skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never quite understood how Tufte's ideas should play out in typical, simple applications.

The only reason I ever check the weather is to see if it's going to rain. Beyond that, I don't care about cloud patterns and animations of global cloud movement. I just care whether I need to bring a coat and/or umbrella (and, during the winter, whether I need to just bring a coat or a heavy jacket and gloves). More information doesn't do that for me (I make my decision based on a single number), and the cartoonish simple display Apple provides already suffices for that.

Where is the clarification to come? I don't get it.

On the other hand, building something for meteorologists or others who have a compelling interest in overall weather patterns would be a completely different story.

Also, I hope people don't misinterpret his advice to show lots of information at once and turn their web applications into huge-ass spreadsheet-like grids of numbers ("more information!") or something.
Why Reddit is Better than Digg
I read it. I found it interesting. As far as I'm concerned, this is hacker news, even if it is related to politics.

In other news, I find it's sad that most economists don't vote (I think it was Steven Levitt who said that).
Microsoft, Icahn offered Yahoo $2.3 bln annual revenue
Amazon does exactly that and so do many other web stores. Alphanumeric listing will probably be taken out of AppStore.
procyon, really misleading title. Probably should say,
"Guardian to Buy Digg?"- still has the interest, but is not misleading.
You can copy IP in 6 minutes
IT in 6 months
But to re-create a culture takes years.

When the owner drives a culture of ruthless business excellence (or otherwise), replacing the owner is not a wise business decision.
It's really not gone. They're just moving Auto Add to Suggested Contacts.
This is neat, thanks!
Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors; I would read his books instead of reading the assigned books back in high school.
I agree that clarity of language may reflect clarity of thought. There are many reasons to "play dumb", from fitting in to intentional deception.
It isn't that hard to admin an RoR app. It's just hard to be reliable on the web generally speaking.

Most of what EngineYard does has little to do with Rails and it's infrastructure that costs a lot of money.

Examples:

Remote Backups every 24 hours. That means a server in a different data center, the bandwidth, and the work involved in setting up and managing the backups.

Remote website monitoring. That means a server in a different data center hitting the site to make sure nothing is down. Money and time to deal with that.

Database replication. A large PITA is taken care of on your choice of MySQL 4/5 or PostgreSQL 8.2.

If you add that together, the price doesn't seem as steep. Database replication means two boxes. The offsite backup adds another box and you could always stick the offsite monitoring on that same box. So, now you're at three boxes and I don't think it's crazy to be spending $300 on three boxes. Of course, with EngineYard, you don't have to do any of the setup work and you have the ability to scale more easily. In that setup, there is no load balancer so as you need more capacity, you then have to deal with a load balancer as well as another application server.

The price is a bit of a premium, but not as much as you might think. Mostly, it's just more than what most developers are used to. I'm used to setting myself up on a slicehost slice. I don't have database replication, offsite monitoring, offsite backups, or hardware redundancy. If that box kicks, my site goes down until they can get it running on another box. It hasn't happened to me and I've been a customer for over a year, but it is a possibility. EngineYard is about eliminating those possibilities. That's expensive, but if you're trying to deploy a site that is your business and not your hobby, you should probably look at EngineYard.

EngineYard is about being able to tell potential investors that they don't have to worry about architecture - and have the goods to back it up. I'm a decent sysadmin, but not like people for whom it's there job. I can get Apache, mod_rails, mongrel, nginx, etc. up and running, but sometimes you just want to know that things are set up solidly from people who have a lot more experience than you do.
Then you're doing it [grieving|loving] wrong.
Believing things will last forever is not a necessary attribute for love. All things are ephemeral.
Do you mean a search engine that does natural language parsing in its backend?

If yes, then problem currently exists, i.e: when i search for python, i get the results relating to computer language than snakes. So a search engine that does natural language parsing can solve this. But its tough to beat big brands(people may type "python snake" and that solves the problem). But still the company can do business with the tech. So there's market for sure.
World’s Highest Garbage Dump
What is Mount Everest? The highest mountain in the world you will answer. Well it is that, but dismayingly, what Mount Everest is now increasingly being known as is The Worlds’ Highest Garbage dump. It is hard to reconcile the image of the pristine, snow covered, wind-swept crags of the mountaineer’s ultimate challenge with that of a rubbish tip, but that is grave concern right now.
The Best Bond
“My name is Bond, James Bond” that line is a cult classic, but I it always struck me that if the guy is this hotshot spy and undercover agent and all, how come he’s introducing himself as himself? How come he is not incognito or in disguise or something? Hmm… not very undercover to give your real name now is it!
Yeah, people confuse "pretty" with "good design". Sure, sometimes pretty things are designed well; but they are not different words for the same thing. Personally, I think the best design is <h1>My site</h1> <h2>Foo</h2> <ul><li>Foo 1</li>... anything else is pretty, not useful. Note that this is how I've designed http://jrock.us. It's very easy to find content, and it looks the same in any browser. And, it took me all of 30 seconds to implement, sparing my time for sleeping or watching TV :)
BookingCharge
thanks. and yep, this was posted before in a different form: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236308
If the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier...
Amazon Invests in Ruby Hosting Company
Reminds me of game companies that distributed their shareware games with similar tactics via BBSs. You can even see vestigial evidence of this today. Check out the Apogee / 3D Realms download page (http://www.3drealms.com/downloads.html), and note the non-insignificant number of filenames that start with the number 1. This caused the files to sort first on most BBSs.
I know folks in the business of selling educational material to corporate customers and it's a huge business. If you have a corporate credit card and have to spend so much for education each year that kind of money is a no brainer.
Are you a Linux sysadmin interested in trading time for bandwith?
I've got a good chunk of bandwidth on a commercial FIOS line, and not enough time to roll out the virtual mail system I want to have.
I'm not that interested in paying someone per hour to set things up. I'd much rather find some Linux hacker out there who can grok Postfix, Courier, SquirrelMail, etc. and who would be interested in helping me with my Linux sysadmining and mail configuration in exchange for having a nice fat pipe to host some project that they've been tinkering with.

Does this sound like you or someone you know? Or maybe do you just have a suggestion other than getting rid of the family and day job? Let me know in the comments.
And in all honesty, if I stumbled on your site in the middle of the night, I'd immediately hit the back button.

I would have no idea it's a personal site, or even what the point is. The biggest words I see are 'jrock.us' which has no meaning in the English language.

You have 3 seconds to make an impression and sincerely, I think you fail with this minimalist design. Put up a photo of yourself and the words, "Perl makes me horny." and suddenly, I get it. Well, sorta. :)
It's a little confusing with their branding, but this money isn't really for a Ruby "hosting" company, but for their other software offerings and development (Merb, Rubinus, Vertebrae).
World's oldest blogger makes final post
R.I.P Olive
Vonnegut's writing about writing is good, but PG's
essay about essays is better:
http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

I also recommended:
http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html
R.I.P Olive
What is it about American cities that make things like this fail? Why do free bikes get stolen in the US, but not in France?

(I'm an American, and I wonder why we have so much petty crime here but not in, say, Tokyo.)
GEOS (for the c64) was the most damn amazing thing I saw back in the day.
Someone gets it ;)
How to make your product a habit
zhesto @ gmail.com - interested.
I've lost more than one someone over the years. To be honest, the most important thing is being happy with yourself, whether you're in a relationship or not.
Arc: An unfinished dialect of lisp [LL1 2001]
Free Software Download And Free Game Download Of The Day
The Woman With Qualities
How I got into iPhone development
Natural Funativity
collection isn't bad, however I'm not sure anyone with that UI of a collection should be telling me about UI...
So Yahoo thinks they can get ~$1.4bln in add revenue besides the amount from Google which they already have? Does there past financial history suggest this?
Amazon does the same thing with Mechanical Turk Qualification Tests (Only has A-Z sorting):

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/findquals?requestable=false&e...
The part about Carnegie doesn't mention how he basically went to England and took a new process for making steel 10x more efficiently from some other guys, came back and invested $100000 in a factory using the new process, and then had congress pass laws enacting tariffs on British steel. He wouldn't have gotten nearly so rich without those tariffs.
10 rules of simplicity
1, Reduce. 2, Organize. 3, Time. 4, Lean. 5, Differences. 6, Context. 7, Emotions. 8, Trust. 9, Failure. 10, The One.
I agree -- it's another classical example of the, "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization" maxim.

I suppose the thing is that the title "Ways to Deal with a Relationship Between an Archtypical Nerd Working at a Startup and Moderately Nerdy Girlfriend Who Isn't" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

There are lots of other walks of life that require startup-level commitment. People working in those "get it". I think it's harder for someone who has a "normal job" and is trying to cope with being resolved to be a "startup girlfriend" (rather than say, a film director or writer or whatever).
I hope this brings more support for ruby to Amazon EC2... I'd much rather hear about an acquisition rather than an investment, but maybe this is just the first step? Is that likely?
I have the Mott reprint and workbooks for this but still haven't cracked them. More's the pity. I do enjoy merely studying the system, but they're really meant to be used, not just read. Unfortunately for the left-handed, due to its era this book makes no allowance for chirality. If you're a lefty who furthermore hooks your hand over to write, well...

Once, men and women of letters took joy in writing and in penmanship and wrote much. Today, especially in the sciences, we find writing tedious, excuse our poor handwriting and avoid it when we can. Perhaps the cycle started before the era of the computer, when the joy of penmanship was drained out of our learning of writing.

Here's a few videos of experts by way of an antidote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C09ebUBAd_s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFs84W50kzc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjUQ4CckYNU (left-handed!)
I intended to upmod ya but clicked down. Stupid touch pad. +1
I think it's exactly the opposite. Digg has a much better mix of homepage stories (not very fresh though, I will admit that).

The posters on digg are considerably smarter then those on reddit. (I know that's not the popular perception, but that's what I've found.)

But reddit has one main thing going for it: it's about 1 thousand times faster to load. (Not an exageration - digg's home page takes about 15 to 30 seconds to render, compared to a fraction of a second for reddit. Comment pages can take several minutes, vs again, a fraction of a second on reddit.)

I've given up on both: reddit for the sheer stupidity, and digg because it's just too slow.
Nanotubes bring artificial photosynthesis a step nearer
Here's some interesting systems software research:

GIGA+: Scalable Directories for Shared File Systems, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N36SE2T48Q
kzar@kzar.co.uk if you still need someone
Ask HN: Mbps How much do you pay and where (city)?
For those of you who pay per Mbps, I am wondering how much you pay, which city / hosting company. When it comes to colocation it seems there is no standard pricing, its how well you can negotiate.

To kick it off, I have a half rack at AIS in San Diego and pay $125/Mbps. AT&T quoted me $500/Mbps unless I committed to 20Mbps at which point they might consider a price closer to $200/Mbps.

I also have a server at a friends rack at AT&T and they have an impressive data center.
"I have written all this down hastily, and when I read through it I see that there are weak patches in my argument and much of it is commonplace."

Yes.
The only reason the long tail is wrong is if people aren't marketed what they really want.
Zoitz       Horror story
Feelspace - electronic compass belt
A culture that prizes freedom over community breeds alot of action for the sake of it. You know, the whole "because fuck it, that's why" mentality.

Additionally, Tokyo, as a populace, is much more collective and like-minded. A hive-mind, to be more blunt and offensive. Individual actions are taken in context of the whole rather than analyzed by itself. Thus, there is just about only bowing as a greeting there; whereas in the US, there's your choice of fist-bumps, high-fives, daps, pounds, pound-hugs, skins, or variations thereof. It's even distinctive by region or even state and city, or RACE.

So, because fuck it, that's why.
I blame scheme :P
but maybe I'm a little too optimistic about the kids :P
I find it very compelling that this otherwise ordinary lady's words may very well be with us forever. (Or at least so long as our society lasts.)

I sometimes find myself wishing more older people would start blogging so that what knowlege they carry will not be lost.
I hope natural language interfaces eventually work. Not just for web search as we use it today, for all sorts of things. Think how great Hacker News would be if you could search for

[well written articles about concurrent programming, written by people who actually know what they're talking about]

Just try to get that with a keyword search ;-)
Why would you want to type "a guide to setting up a new tv that's easy enough for my mother to use" when you could just type... what? Keywordese is not as rich as natural language.
Review of "ANSI Common Lisp"
Converting cars to electric is ... not optimal. Cars are built very heavy these days due to "safety concerns". They're also heavy because they're loaded with features. It's very unlikely that you can find a nice light minimalist car that you can successfully convert, but if you know of any, I'd love to hear about them.
What's Hurting Tech Stocks
Regarding battery technology, if I'm not mistaken, that's already a solved problem: Lithium-Ion batteries have great capacity and are quite light. Their only problem is "venting with flame" if you don't charge/discharge them within their limits, but electronic control can mostly eliminate that.

Now we just need a battery company to start making car-battery-sized Li-Ion's and sell them for a reasonable price. When that happens, I think you'll see some serious action.
Woops, sorry folks, that was my bad...got distracted mid-copy/paste. It's fixed now...
Facebook Puts A Diplomat In Charge Of The Platform
Is transactional memory the answer for improving parallel programming? [pdf]
Ask HN: Is there any text-to-speech API or library for web apps?
Is there any text-to-speech API or library? I am developing a web mashup and looking for text-to-speech conversion. The content of the site changes, so I can't depend on a virtual character with pre-set text. And the app I am developing is going to be hosted on Google appengine, so if there's any server-side stuff involved, then it needs to be python.
PG's essay on essays helped me a lot when I was stagnating. particularly his metaphor of a river. looking at the overall flow of a piece and shaping it with editing has immensely improved my writing.
I now enjoy deciding whether to make an essay inductive or deductive, and playing with the order in which I introduce things to create weird effects (used a lot by one of my favorites Douglas Adams).
Announcing VoteFu for Rails
Speed up Adobe reader or switch to Foxit Reader
Where's the alertbox RSS feed?
Apx Alarm
APX Alarm provides home security solutions to homeowners across the country.
My understanding is that the per-minute risk of car travel and plane travel are roughly equivalent. Per mile, of course, planes are a heck of a lot safer. But if you wear your seatbelt in your car, you should be willing to sit at the back of a plane, right?
We're with EngineYard. I consider them to be cheap, for what they offer. I've never had a better host, ever. They are extremely responsive, 24x7. All communications are with expert geeks (no dumb first-line support). They know their stuff inside out.

EngineYard are cheap if you compare it to the other available options of that calibre:

1) Do it all yourself.. to set up a similar set-up, with the performance, scalability and redundancy of their infrastructure, would cost much, much more both in hardware and in time.

2) Other comparable offerings from non-rails specialists like Rackspace actually added up to a whopping £6k/m - that was for the smallest possible solution for Rackspace.

So yeah, EY are cheap. You don't use them for hosting your blog, you use them for hosting rails apps like kongregate or scribd - in that context, a few hundred bucks a month is peanuts.
EBay Deal With Buy.com Angers Site's Sellers - The golden era of sellers is over
Ruby on Rails Security [pdf]
Minimum valid test is a good way to put it.

Not sure I agree with the last statement. I can only speak for myself but I'm reasonably confident in my abilities and courage has never been an issue.

The constraints I mention in my blog post are important factors for someone in my position (bootstrapping, another business to manage). Doing a private Alpha lets me roll out an application in a way that keeps users happier.
The other thing is that airplane crashes are very often
catastrophic. A whole lot more people survive car
accidents than die in them.

I'm speechless. You think that's something positive? Another way to phrase the same thing: not only cars kill a lot more people than planes, they also multilate and injure even more. Only 4 people died last year in air accident in US (http://www.planecrashinfo.com/2007/2007.htm), which makes it 10,000 more likely to die in a car accident.

You're right in your other point - it seems people don't mind dying so long as they have illusion they could have prevented it. Only when people feel powerless they become afraid.
I've always suspected Vonnegut's classification under "fiction" rather than "science fiction" is a result of the way his books are written. The man's all style - he could pretty much write about any subject and I'd find it interesting.
"James Urquhart came up with a fascinating meme related to this issue, which he calls "follow the law" computing (and make sure to follow some of the links from James' blog as well). The basic idea is that software would become aware of these issues, and be cleverly partitioned to delegate processing (and, presumably, storage) to the legal jurisdiction that provides the most favourable environment for it."

I wouldn't count on it. I'm thinking anyone who tries to formalize the law to any practical degree of accuracy into a computer will hit a concrete wall of incoherence, contradictions, subtleties and complexity.

Thinking of that, the formalisation of law in computable terms would be a worthwhile very-long-term goal.
Similar, not the same, but just alike
What Tech Should Be Seen At TED?  [a chance to suggest]
The PC version was wicked fast on a 286...
I say Apple has done a wonderful job doing input validation on their AppStore data right here.

I wonder if you can name your Application as a SQL injection as well.
Having already read the article on soap, I didn't find this follow-up worthwhile.
Smart classification using Bayesian monads in Haskell
You'll be much better off just picking the seat that you will be most comfortable in.

I would not be at all surprised to find that more people die as a result of deep vein thrombosis caused by sitting poorly on long flights than die in air crashes.
Interestingly the Newsweek article was almost completely made up of excerpts from posts off the web. Is this the future of the traditional print media?
How to use Google’s SMTP server and Gmail to send emails with Ruby
thanks for the tip. its always bugged me too, but I just didnt spend time looking for the option. i can change it now, but do you know what happens to all my URLS that have been bookmarked, saved, indexed by Google etc. Does the change only affect new ones going forward?

Thanks for the heads up!
Mootimeout mootools Request timeout - Google Code
When I try this it fails with a message stating:
"Could not send because +1604xxxxxxx is not available"

Because I'm Canada?
he's the design equivalent of a Fox News "in-house liberal."

yes, designers hate him. he could drop dead and the world would easily be a brighter, more lovely place.

(I'll gladly accept neg votes for this comment. I flat out don't respect the guy ^_^)
Looks interesting. Are there any classification libraries for haskell?
InBev to buy Anheuser-Busch for $52B
Is this going to be pass antitrust in the USA and EU?

The AP article on this says Anheuser-Busch has more than 48 percent of American market share. This will be the fourth-largest consumer product company worldwide.
Is that the fantastic marketing Apple promised for iPhone applications - show them in an alphabetically sorted list?
Best RSS Feeds for Techies - updated to the minute
Very good RSS Feeds for Techies
if you trust the relevance of his research its far, far cheaper to just purchase the report than hire someone to do the same research yourself. I'd suspect most developers with niche products have niche usability needs that make it lesson relevant. If you're building a giant web portal, it seems relatively inexpensive for access to decent comparative stats.
USANA
In 2005 Usana was ranked one of the 100 best small companies by BusinessWeek.
Stop the press: Jason Calacanis has stopped blogging
A paradox could result if you could influence the behavior of the other versions of yourself. That's why it makes sense to use senseless robots.
Alpha: When Beta Is Not Good Enough
This post reminds me of internet applications that have become habits: twitter, youtube, etc

But of all Google has been the best habit. :) anything I want, there's Google. From search apps to office suite to hosting, they have it all.

The toothpaste example doesn't apply to software. Because a new toothpaste may claim that it does X or Y or Z as we see in the ads. We ofcourse don't have time to test it. So most only 'believe' it. Incase of software, example: if someone claims to be better than Google, you can easily notice the difference. I once read on TC about megavideo and watched a video on Megavideo and found that its faster than youtube. That's not yet made a habit, since there's no community there like on youtube.

Toothpaste and Google still have something in common - if I find it good, I'll surely tell my friends.