skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I just buy into Arrington's BS, but the tunescore guy comes off like a jackass. Maybe Techcrunch doesn't deserve extra special treatment, but it is the primary startup news site. "Who are you?" is a clueless response, especially from a tiny company that needs all the coverage it can get.
Stone soup.

Quick summary:

A stranger walks into a village, puts a pot on a fire, fills it with water and, in full view of the villagers, drops in a single stone. Curious, the villagers ask what he's up to.

"Making stone soup."

"You can make soup from a stone?"

"Yes, it's very good. However, it's even better with a little bit of..."

You see how this is going to go. One by one, the villagers bring some little thing or other to add to the stone soup, and in the end they all enjoy some, shocked at how good a soup made from a stone can taste.

The relevance: The whole point of Scheme is to be a minimalist programming language. However, then someone says, "Yes, I love this minimal programming language. Very elegant. However, if you just had support for hash tables..."

After several iterations of this, you have users of this programming language saying "Amazing how much you can do with this minimalist programming language..."
is 20K really that big? what's the average pre-launch beta list I wonder?
We had a repository that grew to about 1.5 gig on github recently (due to hundreds of copies of SWF binaries)...

I'm guessing that you have a fairly large average file size here, so your 1.5GB Git repository contains far fewer files than FreeBSD's 1.8GB CVS repository.

That said, the strongest evidence that Git can't handle a project the size of FreeBSD comes from Linus himself in a discussion last year about KDE: '"Quite frankly, the way git works (tracking whole trees at a time, never single files), that ends up being very painful, because it's an "all or nothing" approach.' Linus' answer was that KDE should split up their repository into lots of small git repositories; that's not an option for FreeBSD.

If Linus himself doesn't think that Git works well for a unified project the size of FreeBSD or KDE, who are we to argue? :-)
While I agree with your assessment, IMO you don't seem to be the target audience.

I loved PCI because it was math-lite.

I'm a business applications programmer by trade and fun stuff like this isn't anywhere on our radar. I also have a family and the associated obligations like T-Ball and dance recitals so I don't have the time to dig deeply into the algorithms and math. PCI was a good balance to me between showing the theory and also providing concrete working code.

My only quibble with the book was that a lot of the code was not idiomatic Python. (un-Pythonic, if you will.)

Just my $0.02.
Optimize Javascript Pages
I'm curious to know what everyone does to speed page load time when using fairly large frameworks like prototype or scriptacululous.

Now I understand the best solution would be to not use them but in my case this isn't an option.
Seven Deadly Agile Sins
Experts Revive Debate Over Cellphones and Cancer
Sure, and that's okay. A lot of people like the Lisp-1 rules and PLT's interpreter is technically very good.

Scheme as a spec is a simple, minimalist language. Scheme as an implementation need not be this. Very few people can fit their problem into pure, unaugmented r5rs scheme. Even if they can, it may mean writing a lot more code than other languages.

I, for one, am excited to see the scheme community embrace a pragmatic goal as opposed to a purist one. Just because they support some reasonable things like FFI and keyword arguments from the get-go doesn't mean that they're suddenly common lisp with a loop sublanguage and iteration in their printfs.
I'm not convinced about the perceived difficulty to learn git et al. You and the other FreeBSD developers are OS hackers. You're telling me it's hard for them to learn a dvcs in a few days? Look at all the Rails developers and users. They seem to have few problems switching to git.
DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, recently talked about getting more sleep. Too much emphasis, he said, is put on the superman mystique of the coder who codes 12 hours/day. We should stop bragging about how little sleep we get and instead wake up rested and productive.

"projects are not dependent on what happens in one day"

As a personal note, from experiencing this many times... once you get sick (which can be accelerated by lack of sleep + diet + stress), the wheels fall off everything (startup/coding? try getting out of bed)
Company Logo Smackdown
That's a surprisingly good overview of research into animal language.

I don't find it surprising at all that animals like birds, and especially primates, can learn rudimentary human language. It's reasonable to assume they label things in their natural setting. In a social species, there would be an evolutionary advantage for one member to be able to describe, for example, that they just found a new banana tree.

We're not special enough for language to have developed from scratch in homo sapiens. Our expressive language had to have come from simpler roots in other species.

The thing about the bird making and using tools was new to me, however. I had only heard of primates using tools before.
It is certainly a "dummie's guide" approach and probably the best book applying this framework to machine learning related problems. It introduces a lot of ideas to people where the math would simply not be approachable.

That said I have three complaints:

1 I think it tries to stay too high level on some areas where it is truly unavoidable and wouldn't scare anyone off to add a little depth.

2 I think it too often labels their implementation with a name that is associated with a family of techniques. This is simply going to embarrass/mislead the reader. In the interest of maintaining simplicity the book states several things that are flat out wrong.

3 No references. If someone wants to take the next step there is zero guidance. This is important because someone learning about a deep topic could read the book and a) think they understand it (not likely) and b) not have a clue where to look next.
Four myths about starting a business
The abstract...

If you've been thinking of starting your own business you may have some doubts that you can make it work. This may be for good reason too. According to a study by the U.S. Small Business Association, only two-thirds of all small business startups survive the first two years and less than half make it to four years.
They can say whatever they want with their fancy degrees in chemistry. I've always suspected that the real advantage of red wine is twofold:

1) Unlike other hard beverages, people tend to not abuse it, thus liver problems don't come up.

2) Like all hard beverages, it has the effect of mellowing you out. I probably spend at least 3-4 hours a day considerably less high-strung as a result of wine drinking. Stress is a killer. This kind of everyday moderate drinking has been the status quo throughout the Mediterranean for 1000s of years.
The intern replied with the TIME 100 article when asked about TechCrunch. I thought that was a bit over the top, and a dig at the CEO for DARING to not know who Mike Arrington is.
Arrington is such a drama queen.
Jesus God-- I'm gonna find out if negative karma is possible.
"The Wisconsin scientists used a dose on mice equivalent to just 35 bottles a day." "[if other compounds are effective] a mere 5 glasses a day might be equivalent."

With those as the lower bounds for efficacy, does it count as having a long life if you don't remember any of it?
Top 10 E-Mail Mistakes
Did they try and balance prick bias? A lot of brain surgeons are hot shots. Hot shots like to show how important they are by using a hands free unit (Mr. Important can't be bothered to use a hand while he's rudely talking on the phone in line at Starbucks). Thus, brain surgeons are likely to use hands free units.
Veoh Blocked Countries and 5 Minute Preview
I don't see why that's relevant. I was responding to the argument that, contrary to the last few decades of high school spending for poorer performance, we might want to consider lowering spending. Unless there is some kind of treadmill of escalating dumbness, and we have to keep spending more and more on schools to break even.
Top 10 Mistakes Businesspeople Make When Forming Partnerships
I wonder if one of the downvoters could articulate what it is about these facts that needs to be suppressed

Good luck. I was going to come up with an elaborate analysis, but it would be wasted. A quick analogy: If you write a post explaining why dell is cheaper than apple, given the same components, you will be severely downmodded. Even if apple is better in every other way, pointing out even a single disadvantage is an affront to people who've bought the whole package, even if they've bought that package because of a single detail.

In Obama's case, that single detail might be: 1) Iraq, 2) Net neutrality, 3) Telecom immunity, 4) Anything else.

ADDENDUM: I'm not going to look it up, but the only time I remember pg being dowmmodded severely was when he criticized (rather lamely, in fact) Ron Paul. So, it's not unusual.
Just took a class with this as the text. Very readable, without dumbing anything down.

This book (by two of the same authors) is also good:

http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/
Yeah, Colin, uh, VC don't vest.
I think it's time for sites like YC News to implement an 'idea tribes/groups' feature in order to survive 'old age'. Site Moderators are only so effective as shown historically by Slashdot...

Delicious does this pretty well (though the way they do it doesn't completely map to most social news sites) and Reddit has started doing this with its topics feature... Maybe YC News needs to implement something similar? Thoughts?

All I know is even with the risk of missing some good posts, I do not want to see anything from the users that submitted and upmodded this post, and simply moderating this will only sweep the problem under the rug temporarily, and conversely the users that like this post will want to continue making posts like this in the future...
This is the second 'top 10' list you've submitted in under ten minutes.
I was under the impression scheme is still minimalist and that plt/scheme is as your describe. The story is nice, but I think it's incorrectly applied.
If you go offshore, I recommend Bermuda or the Caymans. If, however, you're in the U.S. use Delaware and avoid offshoring. The legal and administrative complications and expenses associated with an offshore registration are considerable. In my opinion, if you are a U.S. business then offshore registrations only make sense if you have a large amount of profit/capital for which you wish to minimize Federal income taxes. You can let your capital accrue offshore -- sans 35% FIT -- and then repatriate the profits every 5-8 years when the U.S. government provides an amnesty (usually unlimited, with a 15% FIT).
I think many pseudo-code examples in text books are almost Python already, and that speaks well of Python as a language. "Executable pseudo-code", if you will.
meh I didn't like annotations on Omnisio. The slide syncing was gold though.
I enjoy the handling of downmodded items though. Where reddit hides it and thus makes unpopular views (especially really unpopular views) hidden, YC simply grays them out.
Here Comes the 'ASUS Freee PC'
7 Uncannily Obvious Lessons From A Product Launch
Agreed. It took me all of an hour to learn to use git. We switched our project over one Saturday morning, haven't looked back.
Step Three: Profit!: Fullscreen Hardware-Accelerated H.264 Flash Video
That seems like a very sustainable schedule, and similar to mine. I wake up about an hour later (go to bed an hour or two later), exercise just before dinner, and do my planning in the morning. Other than that it lines up pretty much the same.
They could at least find someone in the right field. What next, car mechanics reject evolution? It's especially ridiculous coming from Sanjay Gupta, the same shill that CNN keeps on staff to attack Michael Moore.
State of Fear is an interesting read. Chrichton lists the many ways those "in power" have sought to keep the commoners in place. Usually fear is the most effective tactic.

I'm agnostic when it comes to global warming.
I definitely think that these bitter Americans and non-Americans cling to social news sites and Obama. I just wish some of them would explain why, instead of downvoting factual information about their candidate. The guy has been a public figure for about four years, compared to maybe forty for John McCain, so I'd expect them to be desperate for new information, and thankful when it's provided. And yet, the more I tell people about Barack Hussein Obama, they madder they get at me!
I can manage that schedule for a few months, but after that I need to shutdown for a week or I start to go crazy.
Ask HN: How do you track user data?
I've found that there are 2 types of user's data:

the one that changes not often - user name, address, etc. and DB is the perfect place to store, search and update it,

and the other one that changes very frequently - recent requests history, menu and page state, etc. This type of data often has complex hierarchical structure (like tree control state) and can be updated very frequently. Do you use DB or some in-memory cache that is committed to the storage from time to time, are there any pitfalls that you've faced?

I'm thinking to use memory cache for this data and a daemon that commits this data to disk from time to time.

I've been using sessions (PHP sessions) to solve this task, but I plan to reject this approach for the following reasons:

1. want to have total control over user's data - storing, caching, protecting

2. want to share the data between multiple servers

Any ideas or advices?
PLT Scheme still doesn't have a meta-object protocol, right? So it's still a ways behind Common Lisp the language, in my opinion. However, as far as the implementation goes, PLT Scheme is really nice and fully-featured. It also has one feature I like a whole lot: it's fully embeddable. As far as I know, neither SBCL, nor Allegro CL, nor LispWorks, nor Clozure are (I know ECL is, but I also don't know anyone who uses it). This makes PLT Scheme a reasonable choice for something like game scripting.
Someone should compile the Top 10 "Top 10 lists" of the day.
Good list. Having been there myself, I'd summarize as "Trust, but verify". I got screwed (royally) by my partner of many years, in part because there were insufficient legal protections in place (which would have been trivial to implement when times were good and everyone was friends.)
Where did all the PHP programmers go?
I don't think that cperciva said that it is difficult to use it. It's not just because DVCS are in fashion that they must be adopted, that's his point.

I'm a happy mercurial user, but that does not make me look down on someone who uses CVS/SVN/Perforce and is okay with it.
You drink wine every night?
My schedule is far too buy to allow that...perhaps that is part of it? You are in a relaxed enough schedule to have some shutdown time every day?
With agile teams all the buzz right now, thought you guys would like this.
JQuery 1.2.6: Events 100% faster
Green revolution: actually green?
I've never understood this mindset. Don't conservative types like you believe in market influences? How could spending more money NOT improve education levels?

Just a couple of examples off the top of my head:
1) Spending more means higher teacher salaries. Higher salaries attract better talent, which means better education.
2) Spending more means better facilities and supplies. Decent materials and supplies lead to a better classroom experience.

I went to a dirt-poor high school in south Georgia. My chem teacher was senile, our textbooks were 14 years old and falling apart, and the sinks leaked chemicals onto the floor. I know this is anecdotal evidence, but more money would have helped my school a TON.

This whole "bureaucratic inefficiency" argument it a catch-all that greedy rich people like to use as an excuse to not help out the less-fortunate.
Image to HTML Converter (clever, but useless)
PHP compiler for .NET
Why are you so afraid of black people?
This is the same kind of sensationalist drama-laden "inference" reporting that Arrington got criticized for with the Yang "We're Done" article.

It's really ridiculous, but I guess we have to remember that TC isn't a news outlet, it's a blog. Sometimes, MA is going to blog about what he's eating for lunch.
Cool. I found if I didn't exercise early, I didn't at all. I also sleep with the curtains open, so I wake up at sunrise. Nice to see I'm not the only one who needs all-nighters to get anything done. Thanks, mrtron.
"And yet, the more I tell people about Barack Hussein Obama, they madder they get at me!"

It's because you're a bigot.
I'm so happy this happened, because this will finally save the world! (Not)

(To all non-US folks, like me: if the US were really so important as they think to be, it would suffice to save them, and all of the world would be safe and happy.

There's only one big problem here: the progress of US is often based on regress of too many other countries, and especially very poor ones...)
Digg visits NYC, loses at beer pong to CollegeHumor
Meanwhile, there are a variety of other things (bad diet, not exercising, smoking, excessive alcohol/drug usage) that almost certainly will impact your health quite negatively, generally for fairly simple, well-understood reasons. So, spend less time worrying about the little things and more about the big things.
Secrets of the 7 Basic Blog Posts
I'm tempted to see if I can cook an egg inside its shell in 2 to 3 days time by placing my phone next to it. It's not 3G though.
Do Loose Lips Sink Ships?
Celebrity Startups Are Back (God Help Us)
To me the interesting part of this story is the advice to 'not cold contact the CEO'. If you have multiple email addresses coming into one box you'd better keep track which one a message is from and respond appropriately. There's nothing wrong about cold contact at a press@ address. As far as him not know what TechCrunch is...that part is pleasing. ;-)
That sounds reasonable, even to a Subversion-hater like me.

That said, I just took a quick look at the web-based CVS browser for the FreeBSD source repository, and I wonder if splitting the project up into a few smaller should have been considered more carefully? For example, ports go into one repository, the kernel goes in another, documentation into a third, and so on.

I'm not a FreeBSD guy, so it's easy for me to make outrageous claims, but I just wonder if inertia was in play here. Reorganizing the source repository to perhaps clarify it and also take advantage of everything git (or Mercurial, for that matter) has to offer, might have made sense. CVSup and the related toolchain will probably need substantial changes to support anything which isn't CVS anyway. In any case, could you give some supporting evidence for your statement that splitting up the repository is not an option for FreeBSD?
"Choosing the wrong partner."

duh
The Sweeds might beg to differ: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-195865.html

The meat:

"However, researchers at the Swedish National Institute for Working Life said they looked at the mobile phone use of 905 people between the age of 20 and 80 who had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and found a link.

"A total 85 of these 905 cases were so-called high users of mobile phones, that is they began early to use mobile and/or wireless telephones and used them a lot," the study said.

"The study also shows that the rise in risk is noticeable for tumors on the side of the head where the phone was said to be used," it added.

Kjell Mild, who led the study, said the figures meant that heavy users of mobile phones, for instance of who make mobile phone calls for 2,000 hours or more in their life, had a 240 percent increased risk for a malignant tumor on the side of the head the phone is used. "
I enjoy drinking Coke after a long day's work, not for the caffeine but rather the thirst quenching attributes. I don't drink more than that due to how much sugar/acid it has.

Does red wine have sugar/acid?
You can use Xdebug to profile your application. KCacheGrind provides a pretty and useful GUI.

Cheers
Two "science" articles from the New York Times on the front page, from the same user, at the same time... oh dear.
Map-reduce-merge: simplified relational data processing on large clusters
A first for me: the exact same post in 2 different threads.

This makes 2 NYT science articles in the HN Top Ten, one about cell phones and one about red wine, both guilty of the same common mistake in lay "science" news. So let's get this right, once and for all:

CORRELATION != CAUSATION

Great. Now we'll have a steady dose of "cellphones are bad" and "red wine is good" from the mainstream pseudo news aftermarket for the next 3 days.

Thanks, New York Times...

"All the Science News That's Fit to Misprint"
1) Minify your JS: http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html

2) Combine it into one file: http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/serving-javascr...

3) Gzip before delivering to clients

or...

use just Google JS API: http://ajaxian.com/archives/announcing-ajax-libraries-api-sp...
you mean envious. semantic nazi strikes again!
Wait, is it bigoted to have information about Obama? Or bigoted to share it? Or is neutral information transubstantiated into bigotry by my communion with Odin?

Please clarify your question.
[London] Prediction market startup Smarkets hiring front-end web dev
Assuming you already have a regular registration system (and optionally some basic user roles), I really think it would take you less time to write your own than to find, evaluate, and retrofit an existing solution which may or may not do exactly what you want anyway.
... and don't use one of the packing (NB: packing, not minifying) approaches unless you measure and understand the performance impact on clients first. Large packed JS can take hundreds of ms to unpack on slow clients.
Think over the long term.

If there's enough HN-vs-not-HN assholery over the short term, political topics will show up less often and there will be less need for both kinds of assholery. If political discussions are allowed to run unchecked, assholery remains at a constant level (and HN enters a downward spiral).
I have a pretty busy schedule but a while back I started adjusting it to allow for time to actually sit down and eat a real dinner. My wife and I usually have 1 glass of wine each. It's a great way to reduce stress and enjoy life. It also helps me get out of the twitchy, burnt out feeling after writing code and drinking tea/coffee for 10 hours.
Can you elaborate on the things it simply gets wrong?
That's a false dichotomy. Time on the computer does not mean one mustn't spend time outside or on other tasks.
How Microsoft Works With Startups
How to Develop or Design Your Product
Doesn't work on OSX for me.

Errrr, oh no wait... it does.
Well, we don't have a way to downvote it, so I wouldn't assume that to be the truth.
I don't follow... Programming my interactions with a website is not mutually exclusive with using a website for services.
Where did I mention that half of Obama's ancestry?
Adobe had image-ready to compete with fireworks. Upon acquiring the Macromedia products, they canceled the image-ready line. Illustrator is a vector editing/illustration suite. Fireworks is a web graphics suite. No need to worry, there is no major overlap (or at least not enough to warrant canceling a popular software title).