skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The sarcasm ended after I pointed it out.
I'm not important enough to be invited to collaborate on collusion. :-)

Also, these reports were probably all wildly exaggerated or blatantly fabricated by Mike Arrington--which is his best reporting technique!
Network hardware failure blamed for PayPal collapse - Computerworld
Running Gentoo with Firefox 3.6.9 on a Core i7, HTML 5 is much more noticeably laggy while Flash (10.2.161.23) is perfectly smooth. In Chrome they're more or less equivalent. (Firefox's sluggishness could have something to do with many Firefox addons and having over 100 tabs open.)
split testing different offers?
I started git earlier than a year ago. You can just read the documentation that comes with git. It's understandable (at least if you are a hacker).
Its still a work in progress, but check out my project http://blotjot.com Its a collaborative whiteboard that works in any browser that supports canvas, including mobile safari on the iPhone and iPad. Runs on node.js + socket.io

Example: http://blotjot.com/heyhn
I think that's a weird and very popular position.

So you don't vote allowing OTHERS to decide the process for you.

Other people who say, elect leaders who nominate Conservative Supreme Court Judges, who then side with the FEC allowing corporations to fund political advertisements. This was quite preventable.

I mean good on you for standing to your principles but with a whole collective of intelligent people abstaining, it's making it much easier for powerful people who want certain laws to happen... well happen.
But if a third party happens to appeal to a similar demographic to one of the main parties (in this case, the Democrats, and the Gore campaign in particular), then it will split the vote. If you don't believe it, then the Bush campaign (Republicans) sure did, since they worked hard to promote the Green party and get them on as many ballots as they could.
Idea: An Android Tablet "Shell"
Out of curiosity, what are the pros/cons of moving from Ubuntu to Fedora? I'd like to try a new distribution as well.
Ask PG: Downvote-related statistics?
With the recent talk about downvotes and karma threshold, I have become curious about my own downvoting pattern. Subjectively, I think I upvote far more often than I downvote. Subjectively, I think I either dispute a comment in a reply or downvote it but rarely if ever both.

No urgency, but the next time the list of things to consider needs a fresh injection of ideas, please consider ways of measuring people's downvote behaviour and providing some feedback. It would be very interesting to see what we users do with our downvoting power.

It couldbe something as simple as a ratio between upvotes and downvotes. It could be something weird like counting how often you downvote something AND respond to it. I don't know what form the feature should take, but it would be interesting to be able to go into my profile and get some feedback about my own behaviour when it comes to downvoting.
But at least we have after-tax prices.
Mobile devices are tied quite tightly to carriers (at least in the US). Tablets are not. I think that's probably enough of a distinction to warrant tracking them as separate markets.
I agree - it's really hard to tell the difference between a project that's an official derivitive of Ubuntu, and not a separate "*buntu" project.

I'm curious - how do you like Debian?
Unfortunately, almost all of my cost is of the per-request variety, and is not scaling per-GB. :(
Which plugin are you using for that "More In" hover text? I have seen a lot of popular websites use it, and its actually quite neat.
Transactional Memory Should (Only) Be an Implementation Technique
If you have ideas for both path, List them all and assesss their potential for growth and demand. Pick the one which scores better in both metrics and start building it. You will come across many issues to solve, one of them probably be cash.
Previously submitted, with many, many comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856791
In the UK student loans probably have a smaller interest than a mortgage.
Small UI issue that stood out: the grey text in the features area on the bottom of the home page is almost blending in with the background making it almost illegible. I'm on Firefox.
How I'm writing my book using Vim, Git and Ruby
I have a netbook that has been completely replaced with my iPad. (Browsing the web is a strong suit)

I think the netbook market is going to dwindle in the face of expanding tablet options.
For git, perhaps, but subversion has Tortoise SVN which integrates nicely with windows explorer.

And I just googled before posting, but it looks like it's been ported to git: http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit
Actually you don't need to do so - at least in Vimperator you can enter 'pass through mode' by pressing ctrl-z. This disables vimperator keys and allows you to interact with sites in 'normal way'.
I think they're still confused. They think the 'smaller team' was what made Crackdown better, and in reality was 'better team'. Size wasn't relevant, only the people were. They admit later they had people who enjoyed making a great game, and others who relished the politics. The latter is what destroyed them.
Less functionality is an advantage for most tasks at hand.

The functionality overload in recent versions of MS Offfice was so huge it made Microsoft develop entirely new user interface (`Ribbon') as the traditional pull-down menus weren't able to cope with it anymore.

Are you sure you need Kate the Average Secretary to toy around with countless functions? Will that add to the bottomline?
As far as I can tell, the advantages of using a RIA (rich internet application) toolkit are:

* easier to develop desktop-like web applications

* more straightforward to avoid duplicating client-side and server-side logic

and the disadvantages are

* your page tends to load significantly slower

* your page isn't accessible to people browsing without javascript or disabled folks

* you'll still have to generate html for googlebot, etc.

Things I'm not sure about:

* difference in development time

* whether it's equally easy to integrate real-time functionality when you're using a RIA toolkit

What did I miss?

(other examples of RIA toolkits are http://www.sproutcore.com/ and http://cappuccino.org/. SproutCore is notable for supporting mobile devices unusually well, so I guess that might be a point in its favor?)
Moral of this story would be: do not rush to launch with a minimal viable product if you're working on an MMO (or probably any console game).
Nothing odd about that. Lots of people use separate accounts for anonymous vs. publicly-identifiable comments.
I guess the bigger concern is who is flagging this type of submission? I can see not upvoting the article, but the flagging seems to go against the grain.
Bypassing Firewalls Using ICMP Tunnel
it's from version 2.7 doc. so it's far less than a decade.
Don't a lot of us create throwaway accounts when posting something we don't want associated with us forever? :)
Your math is wrong, and I don't think it's possible to fix it and get the conclusion you want (because you should think about your total debt, and how much it goes up each day, when figuring out if you can keep up or not).

The daily interest on $1000 with 0.7% interest is around $7. Waiting a few days to pay of the smaller debt will not make it exceed $19.

Edit: Were you banning partial repayments? Most debt (I think) is not like that, but maybe it makes your math work
Absolutely, I try and keep about a 2k float, but aim on building that higher.

And my car did just break down hard enough for it to be junked.
This IS Twilio and OpenVBX - hosted and dressed up a bit.

It's a nicely executed, simple idea for anyone who doesn't want to worry about an OpenVBX installation / updates / support etc.
I know we all love to trash recruiters and think they are an inferior life form, but maybe it was just a typo.

I learned about the Cobra programming language on HN http://cobra-language.com/docs/quality/ and at first glance I thought it was some kind of joke on Python. But no, it's real enough.

Now ask a recruiter to find a Cobra programmer. He's going to run into Python developers who think he is an idiot. The recruiter doesn't know, maybe somebody created a new language called Rudy ( a ruby + d mix ?) and ported Rails.

Disclaimer: I'm working an an app where these guys would be my customers so I'm trying to see them in a positive light.
Do you have any benchmarks? Gentoo's Portage is also Python, and it always seemed much faster than apt or yum. Sure, you never want to search for something with it (use eix, which exists for the same reason "locate" exists instead of "find"), but since the bottleneck seems to be more on the speed of the hard drive it doesn't seem like it matters much what language the package manager is in. Plus part of Portage's speed is concurrent downloads as well as allowing concurrent emerges running.
MacOSX on a 2.16GHz Dual2Core Macbook with Chrome:
HTML5 is really fluent here while Flash seems somehow laggy (I would guess 20 FPS or less).

I think I also found a bug in the Flash version. The ball got stuck somehow at the top bar.
Meet the Command Line
Right, she needs to go back and check the pages again with fresh installs a few times. It may be more or less random.
YC Interview Questions
ROFLSCALE: a discussion of fibers vs threads based on a real IRC conversation
The thing is, to me (and the HN community), this seems blatantly wrong. Why do we need a psychological hack to motivate us, when we know what the optimal solution is?

However, the majority of people who are drowning in debt got there because they weren't looking for the optimal solutions to their cash flow problems. Seeing their debt snowball shrink (or grow, I guess) in measurable steps is what provides the motivation to proceed. And in reality, the difference between your highest and lowest interest rate is probably 15-20% or so. Not enough to make or break you (and if it is too much of a difference, you are probably on your way to bankruptcy anyways).

P.S. Think of the variable cost savings of stamps and bill paying time! </sarcasm>
Nice photos of the actual printer here that I haven't seen before.
I'm currently in Asia on a rather crappy Internet connection. Your 2MB front page took more than a minute to load. I'm glad I didn't load it on my pay-per-megabyte phone.

You might want to slim that down a bit.
Hi everyone,

I whooped up something real quick to help YC applicants prepare for the YC interview.

http://ycinterview.com/

It's a way to keep track of what to prepare (and not forget some things).

If you come up with a question that an applicant needs to prepare for at the YC interview, feel free to post anything you'd like :)
As others have mentioned, there is an epistemological issue with your point. You should not be so confident in your ability to judge whether others are making decisions based on their "beliefs" or informed rationality, nor in your own ability to choose rationally.
A complaint I regularly hear is that it's user interface is frought with peril (and has some poorly-chosen defaults).
Go for the job offers. I guarantee you'll find several areas that you'll find could vastly do with improving and ideas will come flowing in. Learn why they need improving, and build something to improve them.

If you have to think of a problem to solve, you won't know if you're solving it unless you've dealt with that problem directly.
I just picked this up. I have very large hands so I'm always looking for an alternative to a standard on screen keyboard. This works amazingly well. I'm already becoming proficient with it, and it is nice to build up a natural rhythm once you get going. I am already 100% convinced and switching completely over. I was slightly annoyed at first by the lack of a free trial, but I figured this was interesting enough technology that whether I liked it or not, I was willing to spend $1.58 to find out, and it was definitely worth it for me. Highly recommended, that said, its not for everyone.
One has to wonder the consequences of use. The pros most-likely outweigh the cons for someone literally debilitated by a traumatic event.

But, "fear" was part of our evolution and survival as a species and actually serves positive results as well.
Have you actually used it? I tried it out yesterday in Google DevFest, and it's an incredibly nifty device. The touch responsiveness is amazing and the form factor is super comfortable.
Can't comment on KDE because I never liked them, but Ubuntu/Gnome has progressed quite nicely since 2005 (my first "Linux year"). In fact my opinion is 180 degree opposite of yours: 2 years ago I switched to OSX and couldn't tolerate how dumb and unusable the UI felt: I waited a year hoping to adjust but surrendered and went back to Gnome.

I've given up on arguing about GUIs though: it all comes down to individual preferences, oftentimes in coffee shops and offices I look at people and notice how bizarre some of their UI habits are, and I'm sure others can say this about me.

Here's my take on Gnove-vs-others, and a good counter argument made in the comments:
http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2008/11/ubuntu-8.html
Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 10.10 (LAMP)
I develop with flash regularly on my Linux machine (Ubuntu 10.something), and it's definitely a bear compared to windows. I'll be happy for the day I can walk away from flash, but it makes computationally intensive consumer applications much easier/feasible. When we started out project almost three years ago, it was such a clear winner over JS, but now it's becoming a wash.
This also has a lot to do with the fact you shouldn't be starting companies if you haven't worked for one before.

The rationale is that if you don't know what the boss looks like to an employee, you won't know what to do as the boss.
My anecdotal evidence is the opposite.
I'd be careful in this line of thinking, if I were you. Projecting wishes and expectations onto one's children is common, and counter-productive.

I was very excited when my daughter, around the age of 10, showed interest in programming. I showed her Scratch (from MIT), but I think my enthusiasm scared her off-- and she dropped it quickly. I regret that I didn't play it a bit cooler.
We actually made a turtle graphics DSL in Ruby for Hackety Hack, because turtle graphics are so awesome. An example:

http://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/blob/master/sample...
A big problem with git is that the commits-and-branching model is poorly thought through. It's very easy to find yourself on no branch at all, for instance, or for a developer to believe they've committed work to a shared branch when in fact it's a private one (and therefore leave the rest of the team hanging.)

It's merging workflow is awful - I'm fine with correcting the odd whitespace-as-conflict, but I find the fact that git presents me with >>>>> eyebiting ====== conflict markers <<<<<< even when I'm using a merge tool difficult to excuse.

Most of all, more than once, git has completely eaten work, which hasn't happened to me with a VCS since the days of CVS and corrupted repos.

Frankly, I see two kinds of arguments in support of git: arguments that derive from the fact that it's a DVCS, and therefore apply to other (IMO better) tools, or "community acceptance" (a la github, Rails) which I find frustrating and circular. Oh, and it's somewhat faster for infrequent operations.
Actually, I think quite a lot of people won't care about this golden key thing. If they did, they wouldn't be using Facebook either.
Codebreakfast
What’s your favorite Django app?
No, they don't? The Republicans have used filibuster as a threat at an unprecedented level. The Senate has only nominally been in the Democrats' control.

EDIT: Punctuation
1: Point taken.

2: Really? So what about the ones that promote causes you care about? E.g. I care about net neutrality. There are politicians who care about these things and try to advance legislation aligning with these things. Saying all politicians are bad is just simplistic.

3: It takes like... one hour (if at all) out of the day. You can also mail your vote in. I'll agree that I'd prefer online voting, but it's one action in two years.
Facebook Testing “Popular Places” Module
Optimization at the Intersection of Biology and Physics
Assuming you have a credit card, you should pay off all debts worse than credit card debt, and all credit card debt, saving no money. If your car breaks down, charge it. It's only if you have a source of debt that's more pleasant than credit card debt, and which you can't easily get back in case of a car-breakdown-forcing-credit-card-use that you'd want to save some debt to keep cash around for emergencies. And even then you'd want to look at the extra interest you're paying compared with the risk of emergency and the difference between the interest rates of that debt and your credit card, and a lot of the time it'll be like (IF i have a car breakdown, which is 5% likely, then I'll end up paying 5% higher interest on the repair money for a few months ... this is NOT worth failing to repay some debt immediately which will cost in interest a lot more than the expected loss of that incident)
I think they're huge though, no? You wouldn't be able to do photo editing (or even handwriting?)
You only get those phone calls if you're not paying anything at all to the creditors and or/ignoring their phonecalls.
If you talk to your creditors explain your situation and are making payments, the phone calls and letters stop.
that's not much better... 2% still means upwards of 6m devices out there (assuming 300m people in the US), which isn't insignificant. Maybe it's small compared to, say, Apple's iPhone+iPod market, but I think it's fair to say that they're 'off to the races' and there's a good amount of upside opportunity to be had.
It's either:

- A random number each time
- Normal split testing using a cookie
- Split testing using the user agent rather than a cookie

The last one would, I suppose, be more consistent than using a cookie- after all, most people wouldn't switch browsers, but they might clear their cookies.

That being said, a few companies have gotten in hot water for doing this.

Amazon in 2000: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-245631.html

Automattic: http://brianbreslin.com/automattic-caught-ab-testing-pricing... (although they admitted up front they were doing this)

[Edited for readability]
this should use a constant FPS game loop (http://dewitters.koonsolo.com/gameloop.html). Currently, the flash side is much faster; supposedly due to it rendering faster in my browser.
Am I only one who was surprised to see not one reference to any research or proof of his claim? That is, anything that shows a situation where people in, say, equal debt situations, 1/2 were given snowball, half given pay big ones first, then measure debt reduction, satisfaction, perception of accomplishment, etc? Or even just a survey? Anything?

I've heard snowball as a great approach... but without some proof, I wonder if it truly is "...a problem with an obvious but naive solution". Behavioral Economics theorizing aside, even one example from a simple survey or academic study would do much to support his overall point.

Otherwise, his "Many things that don’t look optimal are in fact optimal" comes into question, and I don't want my silly need for proof to get in the way of that essential point, which, come to think of it, I firmly believe even without much proof. But still...
Your source? If you count defense spending (CA didn't want the ICBM silos), 2 air force bases, and interstate highway, yeah. We are on the border, have a low population, and are a truck route (I94 and Hwy2). Having 600,000 people will skew a lot of stats. Counting the reservations in that number might be a little deceptive. Also, do we count the ongoing flooding? If the gov would clear an outlet or just let us move a couple of towns, we could probably cut the bill pretty nicely.
Baby Sign Language can jumpstart learning and communication.

The best videos (IMHO) are from "My Smart Hands" at http://mysmarthands.com/

The founder has free videos on YouTube, an iPhone app, and a new Android app (which I use).
No I don't have any benchmarks.

After getting into an argument with one of the yum developers some time ago, I did sit down and attempt to benchmark apt vs yum, but it's impossible to do this. Fedora and Debian are completely different distros, so benchmarking two package installs isn't fair -- the package you are installing might be configured completely differently or have more dependencies on one distro than the other, so it's just not a fair test.

Nevertheless, yum does feel slower, and anyone who uses both daily like I do would tend to agree.

Does Portage do full dependency resolution? That's what kills package managers (see my posting above yours).
Mobile is completely dominated by WebKit. Chrome's process model, JS engine and, well chrome, are really the only things that separate it from Safari, meaning that Chrome's gains on mobile are fairly moot, since the engine's used in iOS, Android, and Symbian.
As somebody who just got our of school a couple years ago, and is trying get a startup of my own rolling, I have a few bits of insight. First and foremost, I'm not sure what your CS education was like but if it was anything like mine it was mostly useless. The vast majority of skills/knowledge I apply to development and design now were self-taught or I have picked up working as a developer for somebody else. It's easy to ready tons of great articles about practices, methods, etc but until you get your hands dirty and code some stuff that gets real world usage you may be at a disadvantage. For example, things like enterprise-level security practices, planning for scale, having redundancy and fall-backs in place are easy to envision and 'think' you planned for but until you are actually faced with a situation where those things happen you aren't fully prepared. My advice: score the best-sounding full time job you can get and see some live internal tools, business practices, backup processes, etc. Nothing says you can't code your dream product in your free time while still getting exposure to a real, working product/business (and making money to throw at your startup as well!)
1. Restrict TV consumption - help him become selective and not a slave to that time waster.

2. Play music - it probably does not matter what type.

3. Think very hard about schooling.
You don't get how these things things work.

An RFQ (request for quote) by its very nature is a request for specific commodities from an existing purchase contract, which are evaluated on a cost basis.

In it's simplest form related to IT, a server vendor has an part number for a hard drive listed on the GSA contract. Multiple resellers are able to sell that part. A RFQ is a solicitation that says "We would like to purchase 50 units of part #12345". The reseller with the lowest price wins.
Doesn't really seem to work that good on pictures with more objects on it.
What Web Workers Want (And Feel They’re Not Getting Now)
Cheap and cheerful gravity wave detector on the horizon
I owned a kids toy/developmental products company, be careful not to over stimulate your child. Over stimulation is just as bad as neglecting your child. This is the time to introduce your child to multiple languages, just have them playing in the background. Remember children are just large neural networks that work by recognizing patterns.

Don't focus on the subject or topic as much as the problem solving process. Children learn through pattern recognition until they have mastered language which leads to thought.

Remember children have short attention spans so only have them work on a subject/topic for a brief period or the children will develop a negative connotation with the subject.

A few people have mentioned mobile applications they are awesome. I developed a few apps that have been strongly adopted by organizations that work with developmentally challenged children. The simplicity and interactivity really makes a difference.