skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First thanks to everyone who has provided or will provide feedback, comments, etc, even if they're negative towards DNSimple. I'm one of the two guys behind DNSimple and I just want to take a moment to explain what you get and why I think that DNSimple is worth considering for domain registration and management.

First of all, the price of the domain varies from TLD to TLD. For a full price list of the supported TLDs you can take a look here: https://dnsimple.com/tld-pricing - the price list includes prices for registrations, renewals and transfers.

Second, our core business is really hosted DNS. You can use DNSimple without registering a domain through us. Some of you may say that either a.) I can use my current registrar's DNS service and it doesn't cost me anything extra (which is true) and b.) I can host my own DNS (which is also true). If price is your primary motivating factor then by all means go for the lowest cost provider for registration and DNS services. If, on the other hand, you want good, no-hassle service with a REST API and developers who actually give a damn about you working to solve DNS and domain problems you have, then I would hope you would consider DNSimple.

Finally, I just want to say that while I would love to be able to give out free domains, that simply isn't a realistic way to do business. For domains transferred out of GoDaddy right now I'm offering the domains at cost with the understanding that I'll be making some profit from the hosted DNS services. I won't apologize for wanting to stay in business and help people with their DNS, which is really what I want do.

Thanks again for the feedback, and please keep it coming. Feel free to tell me I suck or just walk away, it's all good. In the end I am confident that DNSimple customers will be thrilled with what they get and will know that they are getting something that is well worth the small amount they'll pay each year.
> you compared two specific implementations

Yes.

> and came up with a universal point

No. I got one data point.

Since there seems to be so much demand for it, I compared ALists and hash tables on Clozure Common Lisp. The breakeven point there was 20 items.
I always find it fascinating how poorly the brain conceptualises various problem spaces, specifically in math related fields. The Monty Hall problem is an excellent illustration and just shows how irrationally our minds operate.
I've always thought something like turtle graphics (e.g. http://www.sonic.net/~nbs/webturtle/) is a neat way to teach kids programming/algorithm basics.

It's simple enough to understand the basics, yet powerful enough to be engaging enough to keep a child's interest, providing them a direct visual output to their 'code'.

I would stay away from the higher level stuff like Visual Basic; there is so much magic going on under the hood that it becomes difficult to really internalize the basic concepts of programming.
We learn what we love. Best way to get him to learn computers is to get him to love computers. You'll be setting him up for a life of social awkwardness and little success in the dating game, but you'll be doing the right thing for him. :)

I would start him on games and other "fun" stuff. Teach him to make his own games via BASIC or some equivalent thereof. If it's fun, he'll want to do it on his own. If you're just shoving it at him and it's not fun, he'll resent it and may even rebel against it.
Congress votes on the budget, and all new laws or modifications to existing laws. You don't care if any of that gets effed up in ways you don't agree with?
NASA wants hypersonic spaceships
I think you need an understanding of the basics before you can start to evaluate why users are doing what they do and how to fix problems they have.

The rest of the emails I've sent out recently do recommend that next, though. I just think you need the fundamentals, first!
The Android/ChromeOS strategy makes sense from Google's point of view. At this stage in the game, it's unclear whether the future of app development is browser-based or native, but it's incredibly important to get the answer right. So what do you do? If you're Google, you run a big A/B test and let the data decide.

Apple is doing something similar on a smaller scale by investing heavily in both webkit and native apps. In the short term it causes some developer and user confusion, but it's worth it to make sure they aren't left behind if web apps win in the end.
I've thought about creating a dating site in the past, but never went through with it. I think the best way to be successful with this type of site is to pick specific, niche, markets.

I think you should also make it easy for people to see members on the site, but I realize that without any members (the chicken+egg problem), you wouldn't want people coming to an empty member page.
My list wasn't meant to be exhaustive. Of course you're right, that an understanding of history and who the actors are is important as well.

However, to prefer that point of view is to exclude other possibilities outside of the status quo.

For example, the Republicans were pretty new back in the mid-1800's, with Abraham Lincoln being the first Republican elected president. If my vote were based on past performance of the parties, I'd only have considered Democrats and Whigs.

And if you're following along, you'll notice that the President credited with freeing the slaves was a Republican. How did that happen? Over time, the positions of the American parties have changed quite drastically. In the early 1900s, it was the Democrats who were backing big business. but the civil rights movement shuffled things significantly. Similarly, the (American) definition of "liberal" has changed significantly since the late 1800s. Back then, a liberal's ideas would correspond more closely to today's Libertarians or perhaps a small-government Republican.

My point here is that history can only have limited utility. First, by definition, it excludes new ideas. Second, the parts of the players shift so that long-term comparisons become problematic.
You have some nerve. You really do. Has it occurred to you that the mere act of participation in and exercising your right to vote is an act of "...knowledge and understanding..." in it's own right?

I find the totality of your comments in this thread incredibly offensive. To suggest that citizens abdicate their right to vote is incredulous. I am of the opinion that every citizen should be encouraged to vote by any and all legal means. If for no other reason then to educate people as to the mechanics of democracy let alone exercise a right that generations of people have died to ensure.
And that is exactly the reason he should go to Facebook instead. I never questioned Palantir's engineers - I don't get why you make such assumption. The simple truth is that for a person starting out it looks insanely better to have Facebook in your CV instead of Palantir (generally speaking off course). If he was an experienced engineer and was offered a similar jobs on both companies, then that is a different story altogether. Facebook will have more impact on whatever this young man does next, anywhere he does it, be it in the valley, or in a too hot third world country.

Really if you want to get into Palantir's industry, there is, of course, no better choice. But if you want to get your feet through the door, there's no better option than Facebook right now, and that has nothing to do with the quality of either engineering teams.
The sole objective of any business is to make profit. How a business gets to profitability depends on a lot of variables, but the end goal is always to make profit.

Ergo, since you can't make a profit without revenue, your path to revenue is of utmost importance and should be one of the very first things you consider.
Rudy on Rails
I just got the following email from a recruiter:

"Viewed a resume on Dice. We are working with a client in Columbia, SC needing Rudy on Rails to assist them with an upgrade. This is a short term contract and the client is offering a telecommute option.

Would like to discuss the details. What would be a good time to call you?

Thank you, in advance, for your time and consideration. Looking forward to speaking with you."
That $12m/yr might be added revenue, but it's hard to see how it could represent added profit (as claimed in the article).

Say Expedia earns $200 profit per transaction (total WAG, but intended to sound high). Then $12e6 means 60,000 people a year - or 165 people a day - were failing to complete their transactions because they thought "company" meant "bank name". Similarly, $500 profit per transaction means 66 people a day were thrown off by an input field that's actually pretty common on the web. Neither of those seems even vaguely plausible to me.

Take another tack. According to this article (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69R56X20101028), Expedia had $177m net income this past quarter. That's framed as a big jump from the past, but say they make 4 x $175m or $700m a year. Before this change, they would have made $688m per year. So 12/688, or 1.7%, of their customers were being thrown off by the "company" field? I find that hard to believe.

If, on the other hand, that $12m is added revenue, then (taking the article's $6.89b revenue per quarter figure) we have 0.044% of their customers failing to complete due to this problem. That sounds a bit more plausible.
> By any chance, is your most recently elected president called "moot"?

Sorry. I don't understand this comment.

Is it trying to say, that electronic voting is by definition a failure? It doesn't seem to criticize any specific aspect of the Estonian e-voting system.

Or is it just calling names?
Safari 5 on OS X: HTML5 smooth, Flash sluggish. (Does the "known performance issue" on Safari 5 affect the Flash side?)

Anyway, as the author suggests, this kind of test has merely entertainment value. While 95% of Flash could be replaced by HTML5, Flash still has its place on Games.
I can't' agree with this enough. I got really lucky. I started as an early employee at a startup that had some excellent folks running it. Just the contacts that I made are worth their weight in gold. Better than that, I learned about scaling a company, raising money, and building traction. As a founder those lessons have been unbelievably helpful.
Way to correlate!

I have to say, this type of attitude makes me suspicious. One of the parties in US elections gains a lot by discouraging people in general not to vote, because it tilts the results in their favour. This might not apply to you, but I always wonder if these kinds of comments aren't just in support of that strategy.
I don't know of a YC-clone in London. There's Seedcamp and http://thedifferenceengine.eu up north.
I have no idea who findmebyip is. While the w3c tests aren't complete, I wouldn't say they're not fair. It's not like MS owns them, or even remotely controls them to the degree that Apple or Google do.

The problem with some arbitrary org is you don't know what their agenda is. For example ACID3 was a test largely cherry-picked to hit items that IE wasn't doing well in. Not a general test suite.

So is findmebyip a good test suite? I don't know. But until then I'm fine looking at the w3c.
Probably related:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
I work (part time) with the Dept of Interior. The reason for the Microsoft-centric requirements is due to all of the lawsuits against DoI. As far as I know, electronic "discovery" tools used by lawyers and law firms aren't compatible with Google's cloud, but are compatible with Microsoft's (and Lotus Notes - shudder). Perhaps there will be a few products handling Googles product in a year or 2.

The lawsuits against Interior have to do with Indian tribes being cheated out of royalties going back, oh, a hundred years or more. One book where this subject was touched upon (and gives an idea of the size of the discrepancies) is Sinister Pig.
http://www.amazon.com/Sinister-Pig-Tony-Hillerman/dp/0060194...
Pretty much any tribe with oil, gas, coal, uranium or any other economically valuable mineral is involved in sueing Interior. This means that just about every tribe is sueing Interior.

Employee orientation with Interior includes some explanation of these suits as well as what needs to be preserved.
I totally agree. The reason this is so important is it makes it possible for you to see the ways companies fail without bearing the burden yourself. (Because, odds are, the startups you join will fail.)

It also shows you that there is more than one path to success. I've worked for several startups and each one taught me a different way of thinking about what are the important things to focus on, what kind of people to hire, and what problems are worth solving.
Clickable: http://www.voicendo.com/

Very professional looking. I didn't try the service out because I don't need it for the time being, but I'll save it for later.

Are you bootstrapped or angel/venture funded?
Windows 7 Student Discount Expands to 11 Additional Countries
Running on Firefox 3.6 on a Mac, both sides were very similar speeds. Didn't really see a change at all. Good concept and great execution.
I was hoping to motivate people to do the experiment for themselves. It's not very hard. Doesn't seem to be working though. Oh well.

On Clozure Common Lisp the breakeven point for the average case is 20 items (10 for the worst case).
"Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." - Tim O'Reilly, 2006. http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/08/piracy-is-progressive-taxat...
Don't forget Amazon's $300,000,000 button:

http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/
when i was doing Palm OS programming back in the stone age, i remember the simulator had a "monkey testing mode", where it would just generate GUI events randomly. it was actually quite useful for uncovering sporadic crashes.

EDIT: ha, i found a reference, they're called Gremlins

http://users.jyu.fi/~mweber/teaching/docs/palmos/book/ch10.h...
Maybe he wanted to say that he needed Rudy on Meds to assist them with an upgrade. That makes more sense.
In contrast? Everyone has said the flash is not smooth and html5 is.
Make sure to not use this method when targeting anything below API Level 8.
an opening in the market perhaps
Completely off topic, sorry but I have to share this: Reading this comment, it clicked for the first time ever that "Apple Newton" is a pun.

Wow.
> Much simplier idea but still awesome.

Why is this "awesome"? I don't have an iPad, so I haven't tried it first hand, but it seems to be a simple drawing tool disguised as chalk instead of a solid line. They're a dime a dozen.

I went back and re-checked it out to ensure that I didn't miss anything. This would certainly have been more noteworthy if it was collaborative in real time amongst multiple iPads (e.g. etherpad).
Speaking for myself, this is why I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora. Let me clarify that I completely understand why most users would prefer's Ubuntu's approach, and I'm sure there are ways to make Ubuntu work this way, but basically I just feel more comfortable on Fedora for these reasons:

- There's a huge amount of Ubuntu branding and renaming. I initially paid attention to this after the pretty silent updates that added "Ubuntu branding" to Firefox. I saw a lot of packages and applications that were renamed (or at least represented differently) to make them more generic. Personally, I would rather use the raw software and see the real names for the software packages. Fedora does this a bit too, but to a lesser extent.

- The interface is very polished, but I like having a very raw, stripped-down interface. I generally work quickly, and I can't stand it when the OS can't keep up. I like KDE, and this can be a memory hog, but Ubuntu's additions are even worse, IMO. It was getting harder and harder with each version of Ubuntu to get the interface where I wanted, and now that they're branching away from standard GNOME, I only see this getting worse.

- On that note, I was very unimpressed by Kubuntu, as it had obviously not received the same quality of attention as Ubuntu. As I prefer to use KDE and LXDE, I appreciate the very consistent quality between all the "spins" of Fedora.

- SELinux and hard-drive encryption work out of the box. Again, I'm sure I could get this running just fine on Ubuntu, but it's so much easier with Fedora, so this contributed to me just feeling more at home.

- The kernel had been modified a ton before it got shipped in a release. When I recompiled a kernel it wreaked havoc on some of the software that had previously relied on the added functionality. On Fedora I rebooted into a vanilla kernel and had no problems.

I realize some of these are pretty abstract reasons, but these seem to be directions they're heading more and more, so as I said, I just feel more at home on Fedora, now that I'm comfortable using Linux.
HTML5 will eventually achieve comparable functionality and more importantly, business models may emerge (flash gaming is an industry after all) given time that make it a viable alternative to the people making games. At some point it'll almost certainly coexist alongside Flash games on sites like Armor, Kongregate etc. But it's not going to kill Flash.

HTML5's real fight is against native mobile platforms where it's competing against much richer platforms than Flash and more importantly business models that revolve around a mountain of cold hard cash people throw like confetti at the games they like.

If all it does is coexist or even entertaining the fantasy where it 'kills' Flash its lost, Flash is just the tip of casual gaming. Solipskier made $70,000 in the first 2 months of their iOS version ... against $16,000 on the Flash version (and that's more than most Flash games make).
Technically that is correct. According to my fourth grade social studies teacher a true or "direct" democracy is one in which each eligible voter votes on each issue. What we have is a representative democracy or a Republic where we vote on representatives that we assume will then vote on the issues in our best interests.
A thousand or a million people using tablets to do their 'INDIVIDUAL' thing is not at all impressive.

What would be impressive would be a thousand or a million people using tablets to work collaboratively together toward accomplishing something beneficial for everyone in the group.

From this perspective Apple has utterly failed us even as it has succeeded spectacularly for the people who work at Apple and who have Apple shares to sell to others who hope to be able to sell those shares to yet others for a greater amount of money.
I believe this principle is central to any successful attempt to lose weight. The physiologically optimal approach to losing weight will fail for most where a seemingly less effective approach might succeed.
Minimalist Profile? Facebook Knows About You, Too
This is a thick-headed publicity ploy on Google's part. Hate on Microsoft all you want, but Google Apps are not even close to Office in terms of functionality.
I can’t or I won’t? – A common case of self-delusion
You can do it! I've built and launched two web apps and I just started. Shameless plugs abound [1] [2]!

[1] - http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2010/10/26/reworder-a-tale-of-...

[2] - http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2010/10/24/rmmbr-my-1-hour-app...
I doubt he is right for any N. Association lists require on average N+1 memory accesses. Small hash tables require 1 memory access.

Only in edge cases like looking up a long string in an alist consisting of one short string he's right.
Our attempt to bring GPS track management to the cloud
Ouch! The cruel tutelage of Erik Naggum.

I miss that guy.
Best Kissing Titanic Scene Video | Kissing videos
True enough in 1999, and all but completely false now. For a competently implemented hash map with integer keys, hash tables start beating linear search somwhere between n = 2 and n = 4.

At n = 4, you start needing more than one cacheline to do your linear search. Since a worst-case cache miss is around 300 cycles on a Nehalem, a hash function is very, very cheap price for near-certainty that you'll only probe one line of the structure.

All of which makes the table-pounding tone of this post kind of funny from 11 years' hindsight. The crossover point between linear search and hashing is a result of hardware and software parameters, not rhetorical force. He was right when he wrote what he wrote, and is wrong now. Future hardware/software changes might make him right again, but might not. I've indulged in the "real programmers vs. quiche eaters" rhetorical flourish at times, too; this post is a welcome reminder of its risks. It looks better to posterity if you do the experiments, state the results, and walk away.
I guess you're not a direct accredited registrar? Who are you reselling for? (I'm sorry if this is mentioned on your website. I didn't have the time to look for it.)
Smart People Do More Drugs--Because of Evolution
Here is the face detection demo I ran: http://liuliu.me/detect/detect.html#http%3A%2F%2Fimg.dailyma...

(press the Detect button when the page loads)

That is impressive.
Ask HN: Threshold for downvoting changed?
I have noticed over the last few days that I'm not getting the downvote arrow anymore. Has the threshold for downvoting changed? Is anyone else seeing the same thing? I hadn't even noticed until someone pointed out some downvoting and I realized I didn't have the arrow anymore. Even then I thought it might be a temporary thing or something, but now it just seems strange to me.
The rumour is that Android 3.0 will be tablet-friendly. Hopefully we'll find out on the 8th.
HTML5 way smoother for me with Chrome unstable on Ubuntu.
This is government work. The US government continues to award contracts to companies that consistently fail -- either massively over budget, extremely late, incomplete, non-functional, or (most often) some combination of all four.
Twilio based?
I think a MS employee wrote this RFQ.
The poster should have quoted both titles in the article:

"Tablet Market: 95% iPad, 5% Everyone Else; Things Will Change in Q4 2010"
I was hoping to swoop in with a "User Agent Switcher to the rescue!" message. However: switching user agents works in Firefox but the app layout looks broken [1] and it doesn't do anything; and switching user agents doesn't seem to work in Chrome.

[1] http://postimage.org/image/1z21v9nhg/
I haven't read it, but Pragmatic Programmers has a beta of their forthcoming Arduino quickstart book available:

http://pragprog.com/titles/msard/arduino
I believe there's quite a few companies selling styluses that work with the iPad.
Stimulus bill put ~ 8 GW of geothermal on US grid
Even if GOP takes over again, that will be there forever now, pretty much at fossil fuel prices per kwh - under 5 cents - once capital investment paid. Alameda next to Oakland has long had lower electric rates than PG&E because it gets so much geothermal power from the Geysers, from a contract signed in the 20s.
Win7 x64, Opera 10.6: Flash is very jerky and HTML5 is soft and silky smooth. Interesting to see that others are seeing the opposite.
Thanks! I actually tried installing these, but haven't noticed the warning that it shouldn't be configured via gnome-appearance-properties.
Good point, I forgot about that, I don't buy enough apps to deal with it much. I guess I might as well try it out then.
The blog post is a little light on details. Just go to the source and demo on the original creator's site: http://liuliu.me/detect/detect.html

Canvas allows access to individual pixels in an image, and JS is arguably faster than BASIC interpreters of the 80s. Fun things lie ahead in client-side image processing.

EDIT: Incidentally, the code is pretty hairy and has about 3 comments. It's hard to figure out what ML approach he's using from a cursory look.

EDIT: Aah, definitely an image pyramid in there, so some multi-resolution stuff happening.
I think it's 500 karma now, used to be 200.
Firefox on windows 7 - both are smooth but html5 slightly more so.