skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its out now, and I was going to try it like a lot of other people have said, but there is no way to try it for free. The cost isn't very high ($1.58 right now) but with Swype already I don't see a reason to pay money just to try it.
Async DNS Resolution in Tornado’s AsyncHttpClient (curl multi, c-ares)
I decided not to post this to HN as a topic, even though it is non-partisan and I support the message. But since there is already this "vote" thread, I offer your this perspective and perhaps motivation:

[2008] Craig Ferguson: If you don't vote, you're a moron

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdRVQ4xwwmQ#t=06m25s

The above link "cuts to the chase"; however, the entire monologue is worth watching (more commentary on the campaigning, including its hypocrisy).
Get a job to put your skills into practice and also know better the market.
Face Detection in JavaScript via Canvas
I'm sure I'll thank them when I wander into a riot they could've told me about ahead of time.
A/B testing probably wouldn't have caught this.
Or "few". Maybe he meant "couple"?
I can’t or I won’t? A common case of self-delusion
That's great, but it's not 1845, and I know that not all Americans are Constitutional fundamentalist nutjobs. :-)
Agreed, but being able to present useful information in a context that makes people more receptive, rather than hostile, is also a handy skill.

It's easy to deliberately overlook rudeness, but it still unconsciously colors a person's responses and thoughts, which could have a negative impact on the message.
Hard to get off ATG? Sounds like the perfect addition to Oracle.
Seems to me like a free version of 37signal's iPad app Draft. Much simplier idea but still awesome.
I would probably think about it terms of how many people would/could use it. If a million people use your product, monetizing it wouldn't be too hard to figure out later.

Haven't spent a lot of time thinking about enterprise stuff, so maybe this doesn't apply to that type of business.
Dating Site Completed... sigh
Seems like a remake of their Draft app with a chalky UI.

To really make a mobile web app be cool, it's still gotta work on the web. Otherwise, it's not cool. I'm making that a rule right now. Visiting a URL that says I have to be on an iPad is not cool. It's like saying I need to install a plugin that costs $500.
While I'm seeing better perf on the flash side (XP, FF 3.6.12), Pong isn't exactly an ideal test bed.

Interesting that on the page they say "We believe the two technologies are not in competition" but that is exactly what this type of demo is going to stir up. While the improvements in browsers and javascript engines as of late has been nice, I think we're still a few years off from real parity, especially on lower-spec'd machines. Make no mistake, Flash on the web will be obsoleted by HTML5. But not yet, especially for all those people who don't update their browser every month.

For the time being, if Flash evangelists really wanted to make a point, they should do this same type of set up, but with a complicated (hardware-accelerated?) visualization.
Depends on your product. A 37signals strategy would be to bootstrap it and charge for your product (works well with b2b). Or do what Facebook initially did which was start with no monetization strategy and scale it. I would say if you have a great idea in mind that you feel can drive millions of users to use your web-app, do not charge for it and raise money.
We made one for the U.S. elections except focusing on every single candidate instead of party.

http://www.votereports.org/

Also one which focuses on people in your social circle + other sources.

http://www.circlevoting.com/
Naah. Galaxy Tab shows that it can be done.

The reason most of the Android tablets I've seen so far have been rubbish is that they've had resistive screens and slow processors.
In this case, the useful skill is scanning that wall of text to extract the small nugget of useful information:

For small N, finding something in an association list can be faster than finding the same thing in a hash table.

Naggum also could have run some quick bench marks and figured out at what size N hash tables become a better choice (depending on the nature of the keys, etc. etc.), in less time than he spent berating the intelligence of the questioner.
Are you in a startup career path or are you one and done?
The amusing thing is that in addition to the ideological divide within the Liberal party itself (between true small-L liberals and conservatives), the Liberal and National parties are not obviously ideologically compatible either -- the Nats are basically social conservative agrarian socialists. :-)
Winning the Trust Game
Flash on linux sucks quite a bit unfortunately :(
Why so somber? You also won the match! ;)
I reasonable protoss player will scout. This build cuts out a lot of zerglings and unless you can deny a probe scout it will be very transparent that you're going for a 7RR. A zerg who does not take an expansion quickly or lets at least a few lings to scout / deny scouting is very suspicious. Additionally protoss have access to the sentry and zealots will kill a roach in a 1v1 battle. They key is to force the roaches halfway up your ramp then cutting them off in half. Ideally 3 on top of your ramp and 4 below. A few stalkers should be able to hold them off.

Forging up, and dual expoing (correct me if I misread you when you said dual exp) into "quick" air is not a viable strategy.

A reliable strategy would be to hold off the initial push and securing your natural. You should be in an economic lead since he sacrificed 7 larvae early on in the game for the attack. From there the game should transfer into a standard ZvP with the protoss being slightly ahead due to a higher probe count.
Ask HN: London Based Y Combinator?
Is there an equivalent Y Combinator incubator in London?
Tablet market: 2% iPad, .5% everyone else, 97.5% people who will buy a tablet but haven't bought one yet. I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I really do think this is the better way to think about the market right now. A market of one credible contender is not enough to draw conclusions about what will happen when there are more. (Android will soon be credible but I'm not sure it's there yet.)
> 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.

Exactly. It's disappointing how much time and effort has been squandered on various abstractions primarily popularized because they gave developers excuses to avoid learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

When it comes to Silverlight, it's easy to see how so many devs were tempted to unnecessarily overuse it. Microsoft's PR efforts are often panned, but the Silverlight hype machine was incredibly persuasive. I even questioned my own focus on standards-based development[1] for a few brief moments during conferences like MIX.

[1] http://encosia.com/2009/09/14/is-silverlight-the-new-webform...
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1866122/rapleaf-agrees-lea...

rapleaf seems to be imposed with heavy restrictions from Facebook.. what exactly is the issue..is unclear though....
>If a voter is reacting emotionally to propaganda, without taking the time to understand the real story, is this much different from rolling dice?

To understand the "real story", I'd trust someone who had paid attention to what the parties have done over decades, reading news and analysis, over someone who merely read a book on political philosophy at some point.
I don't think they care if if it's 'cool'... It's just an experiment/toy that they decided to blog about.
Is there a problem with just leaving off the O() altogether?
And here's the magic: http://chalk.37signals.com/chalk.js http://chalk.37signals.com/stylesheets/chalk.css

It's fun to look at this stuff, especially from the perspective of someone who hasn't gotten into HTML5 yet.
Oh that was mean mean mean. I don't know how long it will take that song to leave my head now :(
Calling Methods on Potential Nil Objects in Rails
See my original post...I acknowledge that an inverted index can do it, but when you have to make it compatible with a wide range of hosting and technical ability as in the case of vBulletin, you are more limited. The typical forum owner will not install a standalone search engine, especially if his $5 hosting doesn't support it
Heh, just noticed that myself.
I remember Erik giving this up at some point, and using a more conventional style, but I can't find it now.
Thanks! Always enjoy adding to my command line tool belt.
Wow... seriously?
Don't you have a better use of your time than to tell everyone "Hey, I figured this thing out. But I'm not going to tell you the answer."

I'm struggling to think of a non-trolling motivation that explains this behavior.

This is giving me comp.lang.lisp flashbacks.
From an economics point of view, it's basically another way of saying that wealth maximization is different from utility maximization. While the two are frequently correlated, it's not necessarily so.

The snowball strategy could be perfectly rational for people who gain more utility from the small but frequent accomplishments of paying off debt earlier than they do from maximizing their overall lifetime wealth.

It's not what I would do, but as they say, there's no accounting for taste.
The problem: I want to browse the web (on the go) for long periods of time, on a reasonable screen and without a cord.

Potential solutions: Traditional laptop: nope. Probably < 4 hours battery, huge and heavy, overpowered for the task.

Phone: nope. screen is too small for comfortable web browsing, typing is slow.

Tablet: sure, this would work. But they're > $500, so that's a pretty solid commitment.

Netbook: yep! > 10 hour battery life, okay screen, perfect solution to "I want to browse the web on the go". They can be had for ~$200, so you can save hundreds by not going for a tablet.

Note: I own a netbook and love it (I have the new System76 Starling). I don't own a tablet. So maybe I'm biased.
Yeah, I usually refuse, and they simply enter 99999 or some such. It's only for marketing research, so they don't actually care.
Strongly recommend, if you're interested in startups as a career, that you add "taking a job at a startup and working your way up to a key role" to your to-do list. I know a couple people who have tried to make startups their career by serially founding go-nowhere companies; that's the wrong way to do it.

(My rule of thumb, which I've back-rationalized onto my career, is not to start back-to-back companies).
Ideally, sure, but in practice a little knowledge is often a dangerous thing, and people who think they know what they're talking about might have a seriously flawed understanding of the issues and their possible solutions. There are entire fake "think tanks" based on providing this flawed reasoning to those who don't question it enough. How to distinguish between "informed voter" and "brainwashed voter"?
You can pan and zoom with the mouse, too. The controls at the top right made me think i can't do that, at first.
Ask HN: How do I give my son a head start?
There are few careers around today that wouldn't benefit from the employee having a better understanding of programming and just IT in general.

As well as the fundamentals such as reading, writing & mathematics, I fully intend to introduce my son to computing from a very early age.

I was thinking that I could introduce him to things like BASIC not long after he masters the art of counting to ten but I would love to hear from you guys.

How would you suggest I give my son a head-start in an IT orientated world?
He's 6 months old currently so I have plenty of time!
I'm not a user yet, although I will definitely use it for my next domain transfer. I am interested for these reasons:

- it has an API (https://dnsimple.com/documentation/api) while my current registrar doesn't provide an API and I'm tired of manually configuring this (I want to write reusable recipes)
- it apparently has templates for Google Apps configuration (from the /plans page)

Icing on the cake: there's an iphone app to manage the DNS, too.
From the reddit conversation: you can return any market app within 24 hours for a refund. Seems a bit cheeky, but it does allow you to demo it.
Sort of like asking "Am I in love?", "Am I popular?", if you have to ask, the answer is no.
In this case, the A/B testing would have been with that field and without.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this just websockets, not the whole of Socket.IO (i.e. fallbacks for non-supporting browsers)?

There is also: http://github.com/SocketTornadIO/SocketTornad.IO which is a port of Socket.IO that runs on Tornado.
Yeah, I don't care either. I'm saying it's not cool because I can't even play around with it.
While I understand the point behind the example where you don't just have a car, you have a vehicle, it ties a vehicle to an engine which just isn't a sound design either. i see many 'how to design' articles that replace one bad practice for another.

what about bicycles? or sailboats?

all in all, this is just too unfocused. one topic should have been addressed and addressed fully.
I've suggested people use it for their office documents.
When are we going to acknowledge that distinctions like "tablet" are anachronistic in the first place?

It's all about the software platform. I'm sure the folks at Google make little philosophical distinction between the Android "tablet" software and the Android "mobile" software, for instance. Nor does Apple call its iPad OS a totally different name than it calls its iPhone OS. Other than some minor cosmetic differences, the code is 99.9% the same.

Tracking share in the "tablet" market is going to seem very silly in a few years.
Is 37signals treading water? The frequency of these worthless blog posts attempting to draw attention to themselves has been increasing. They say they have a lot of customers but something feels wrong.
You also seem to only refer to liberals,... I thought individual freedom and equal rights was a core principle in liberalism, but I guess you are only counting positive freedom.

Huh? I mentioned JS Mill and Locke, Mises and Hayek. The first two were classical liberals. That's a very different thing than what we label "Liberal" (with a capital "L") today. You'll find individual freedom at the core of their work (e.g., Mill's advocacy for women's suffrage).

Mises and Hayek would, I imagine, also consider themselves as classical liberals, but by their time the definition (in America) of "liberal" was changing (which is why I drew the capital-L distinction above). Both of them wrote extensively about the primacy of the individual.

You reference positive freedom, but the idea itself wasn't coined until the mid-1900s, long after Mill and Locke were dead, and with much of Hayek's career behind him. But I feel safe in saying that none of them would find much of value in the concept of positive freedom.

But my advocacy that you understand something is not the same thing as saying that you must agree with something. Indeed, in order to disagree with an idea, you must first understand what that idea is -- know your enemy, right?

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the government backs up its policies with force and violence, ultimately. Thus, advocating a policy is, in the end, a threat of violence against those who disagree. If you're going to do that, you better be damned sure that your ideas are correct.
Same here, Chrome 7 on OS X.
If you'd like to give him a head start, give him room to decide what he'd like to do.

Don't limit his abilities, or options.

Perhaps he will not be interested in IT? He could be the man to cure Cancer.
I'm glad to see the increase in GIT tutorials, about a year or two ago there wasn't anything out there except confusing circles that you spin in for people who already know GIT.

Perhaps a blog like the daily VIM might be a great idea for any keen hackers out there.
If you are the guy behind this site.. care to elaborate on the "market cap" of indian matrimony sites? Have you launched recently? profitable? size of user base?
Hacking code on the bus -- my 17" macbook pro isn't good for this.
I have never figured out how voting by mail is possible. The case I'm interested in, a classic, is the husband dictacting to his wife who to vote for.

When you vote by mail in the comfort of your home, how do you guarantee that no such tampering happened?
I analyzed your tweets, site, etc. myself, and odds are good that you are a capitalist but would be better off voting for a Democrat. I say this because 1. You are a Hokie, 2. You are schmoozing with big wigs of companies that might end up killing conversations with you if they found out that you weren't a Democrat, and 3. You tweet a significant amount, leading me to believe that communication about what you are doing seems more important to you than the business of what you are doing or thinking of other ideas, and imo this sort of self-absorbed sharing is a tendency of those of the more liberal sort.
I'm tired of the 'woo html5' and 'hate flash/silverlight' camps.

It feels as if the same people who talk about beating 'proprietary' with an open web, open standards and open source code seem to miss we have _no_ choice when it comes to web programming, it's html/javascript or bust.

And javascript is not fast enough. Not even vaguely close to being fast enough. You must have seen the semi-regular 'look what I did with HTML5' demos, yeah great, until you put them next to a flash or silverlight demo. Then suddenly it looks pathetic. It's not up to the job.

This is a step back, not a step forward. It's not for the 'greater good', html needs decent competition to keep it modern. Competition is healthy!

While it would never happen and will never happen, Microsoft releasing Silverlight as an update to Windows could have given the HTML standards the kick up the ass they need to start taking application development seriously.

For most of us the browser is the new defacto OS.

We're a community of entrepreneurs and developers for pete's sake. And yet we're cheering on a virtual quango creating HTML5.

Relying on committees to drive forward the web is absurd. When did meetings and committees ever actually solve a problem or produce amazing innovation?
Usefullook at the competing claims
I guess not many people get to vote, using this system...
Lawmaker calls for screening of all cargo planes in U.S. for explosives
Think this is also true for anyone who works in an open plan office. Any number of halfalogues can be going on at any one time, tough to tune them all out without an mp3 player of some kind.
May 1920, p. 27: "Dare We Use This Power? Sir Oliver Lodge says atomic energy will supplant coal"

..."I hope that the human race will not discover how to use this energy," he says, "until it has brains and morality enough to use it properly, because if the discovery is made by the wrong people this planet would be unsafe."
Haha. I, too, insisted on the 17" when I got my new one awhile back. So delightfully impractical. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
The lack of this is the primary reason I don't consider running Fedora over Ubuntu. Shallow, perhaps, but when you stare at a computer screen all day, good font rendering matters.

There is a guy who maintains a set of Fedora packages with versions of Cairo and Xft with the relevant patches for that beautiful font rendering: http://www.infinality.net/blog/?p=5

I've always been reluctant to jump to Fedora and rely on this guy to keep up his work, though.

EDIT: Looks like this guy already has these patched packages (and some Freetype tweaks too) ready for Fedora 14, see his most recent post.

I still really wish this would get out of the "some dude has to patch it in" territory and just become the standard font rendering configuration for Linux distros besides Ubuntu.
David races sports cars.[1][2] I'm pretty sure they're doing just fine.

1: http://www.youtube.com/user/dhhracing

2: http://www.autoblog.com/2010/09/07/pagani-zonda-hh-commissio...
Happy Birthday George Boole
> He's 6 months old currently so I have plenty of time!

You do indeed. Don't forget that. You have at least 8 years left before your kid should start doing this kind of thing. Just let him use a computer in a completely natural way, don't force anything on him. Programming is decidedly different from, say, playing the violin!

Also, less importantly, skip the shitty languages phase. It's not necessary to go through Pascal or BASIC before you can get to the good stuff: Python will do from the very beginning.
What market share does the Apple Newton have ? ;)
it would be super easy to add support for mouse events.

[tutorial]

They are attaching events using jQuery's bind method. Like:

canvas.bind("touchstart", ...

You can add multiple events into bind. To add support for mouse events, you'd just add in the requisite mouse events, like so:

canvas.bind("touchstart mousedown" ...

canvas.bind("touchmove mousemove" ...

canvas.bind("touchend mouseup" ...

[/tutorial]
Ask YC: Review my startup, Voicendo
Check it out at http://www.voicendo.com/

In short, Voicendo is a virtual phone system for small businesses and independent professionals. We support all the stuff like call forwarding, menus, conference calling - even SMS. You can use local or toll free numbers, each at $5/month. All usage (incoming/outgoing minutes both local and toll free, and SMS) is billed pay-as-you-go at $0.03.

It's all drag and drop, I feel anyone could use it.

Would love your feedback on the idea and its direction!
Pierce county in WA still has polling places. It's Oregon that is entirely vote-by-mail.
Are you the guy we hired from a previous HN post? If so, welcome! If not, welcome anyway!
You're not just voting on issues, you're voting for a representative. If the party you agree with doesn't have the votes in Congress, whatever ends up happening in the next 2-6 years will be less likely to be resolved the way you like (or at all). And in fact things may get worse from your point of view.

It's not a referendum. You're imparting political power on the party you vote for, relevant to anything that comes up in Congress in the next 2-6 years.
By chance,even if somebody is eager to explore tourist locations in Jammu&Kashmir, this site would be an instant turn-off!
thats fair. i see the exact same 3-pack at around $9.

regardless, though, you're right, its about convenience and margins. i've not done the legwork, so i don't know what the margins look like on something like this.
Somewhat offtopic but I'm curious, is it possible to have a resistive touchscreen and capacative on the same tablet?

Then you get the best of both worlds, and could use a stylus for fine input, and your finger for navigation, etc.