skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is the Eurovision song contest rigged? An investigation using simple data visualisation.
A simple visualisation technique is used to investigate allegations of bloc voting in the Eurovision song contest.
Online Shopping frauds Expected To Rise Through 2010, Then Taper Off 
According to a report titled '2008 Identity Fraud Forecast' released by research firm Javelin Strategy and Research,
"More consumers are being victimized by fraudulent use of their credit cards to make online purchases, and such crimes will increase through 2010 before tapering off."
Not sure if anybody reads this since the thread is already off the first page, but still: Thank you all! I think there is some great advice and I am positive that it will help me.
Upvoted for Beautiful Soup. If you are into Python, its great for screen scraping websites and striping off markup, leaving only the necessary information which you can display on your own site. great for accessing sites that don't have a public API.
I would suggest you have a look at usleep, nanosleep, ualarm, and setitimer/getitimer. These are the high resolution timer functions found in UNIX/Linux, and have been worked over by really smart people for a very long time (at least since POSIX in the case of some of them, but probably years before that, as well). Then again, it looks like the POSIX functions have a range limitation of 0 to 999999, so maybe they're using much smaller storage than you'd use. If history is any indicator, I would guess that the Linux implementation is not subject to those limitations internally, but imposes them to match compliance with the POSIX standard (and probably provides the less limited functionality via an optional parameter or library call--just a guess, here), so a look at the Linux high resolution timer code might turn up very useful ideas.

The only high res time tool I've ever used was Time::HiRes from CPAN, so I have no low-level understanding to impart to you. I just know what the functions are called, and figured that might get you started in the right direction.
Wedding Shop
Wedding Shoppy - A Complete Wedding Shop offers a Wide Range of Wedding Products including Unique Wedding Favors, Wedding Invitation, Wedding Photography, Wedding Planning, Wedding Jewelry, Wedding Dresses, Bridal Gowns, Wedding Toast and more. We specialize in Wedding Favors & offer a wide range of Categories for Wedding Favors. So plan your wedding at Wedding Shoppy (A Complete Wedding Shop) & get rid of all the Wedding Tensions.
This sounds good except for when Insurance Companies get so good at determining who exactly is likely to be "medically unlucky" that those people are effectively prevented from getting any healthcare at all.

This is a very real problem for entrepreneurs who want to buy their own healthcare, and also for very small companies. I know of one company that was basically prevented from hiring an extremely talented individual because that individual was flagged as a high risk to be "medically unlucky", and if she joined the company than everyone in the company would be ineligible for healthcare - in this particular instance if you're less than five people than you can't buy a group policy with one of those five being a high-risk individual.

So these high risk individuals are either able to join a large company where they can be covered in a large group plan (better hope you're a skilled worker, since very low-end employers have incentives to hire part-timers or contractors to avoid paying benefits), or they have no coverage and go to the emergency room when catastrophic problems emerge, at great cost to the taxpayers who pay for those emergency rooms which (for quite good moral reasons) don't turn away patients who can't afford visits.

Maybe this is one of the things you grouped under "various important details", but I think it's more than a detail - denying coverage to risky people is going to be an inherent consequence of introducing profit motives into health insurance.

I don't necessarily think socialized medicine is the answer, given the inefficiencies it introduces. The best middle ground might be greater regulation of insurance companies to prohibit them from denying coverage to sick individuals. But given the risks on each side, I would frankly much rather err in the direction of too much socialization.
One could ad Neal Stephenson books in general. Especially Snow Crash. Jointly, with Cryptonomicon, one of the best books I've ever read! In Snow Crash, the author envisioned stuf like Google Earth or Second Life, only in a much more advanced way. The book was written in 1992 :-)
All those non-secrets may apply for Loic, who was already a well-known blogger and promoter with a large community before he created his startup. His advice is just not applicable for everybody.
And that's why you always leave a note.
Try accessing it via http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/browse.cgi

As a bonus, you get a search box.
I have used YUI grids extensively on a large scale website i am working on. It is very good and i try to use it whenever i can instead of handwriting my layout.

I would definitely recommend it. In fact, i would recommend all of YUI both the JS part and the css part. I also would like to try blueprint when i get a chance.

Oh, and for the quirks, well they're not really quirks. Anybody who has tried to write cross platform css and JS would tell you of the nightmares that they get if they ever get to sleep. Listen to Nate Koechley talk about grids and base....he explains a lot of the decisions taken.
Any group is surrounded by people who cop the attitude but don't have the talent. Think of all the wannabe rockstars who focus on the drugs and the groupies, or the people who can't write, but mimic Sartre in coffee and cigarettes.

In the case of Oxbridge (and others?) the opposite effect is also important. There are a lot of smart people around those towns who aren't connected to the university. Often they don't get the respect they deserve from university folks, because they don't have the attitude and the style and the in-jokes.
Well, for non-technical books; I have enjoyed the following in no particular order:
- Founders At Work
- Eric Sink on the Business of Software
- The Great War for Civilization
- Pity the Nation
- On Intelligence
- The State of Africa
- Long Walk to Freedom
....etc
Indeed, but if your site is important to you, you should probably be monitoring its health. I mean, everyone makes backups, right. right? Doing the occasional (1x/week?) check on the files that changed between backups is pretty straightforward and will give you a good idea of whether there's foul play going on.
Think about marrying an european as well
Did you implement that site in Rails or in Django?
Agreed. There are good time/date libraries out there, including the functions in the Linux/GNU C runtime library. Trying to do this yourself is just asking for unnecessary pain: the library functions handle all the quirks for you, from weekday/d/m/y h/m/s.ms.µs.ns <-> internal representation conversions to time zones, leap years, leap seconds, etc.

This is a solved problem. Use the existing solutions.

And if for some reason you need absolute control and the built-in functions just can't fulfill your obscure needs, using doubles doesn't seem like a particularly appealing solution at all, as you'll still end up with precision issues on non-integers, except they're harder to control because they will vary. If there's something the built-in functions can't do for you (I doubt it!) I suggest reading up on the internal representation those functions use, and see if you can build on it.
This is a bit silly.

By your logic, could any spoken language be like perl?

Japanese would be INTERCAL, because of you have to express a certain amount of politeness toward the comipler.
I'm afraid I don't understand the downside of nanoseconds since epoch. What accuracy problems and rounding errors? Are you suggesting that nanoseconds are too coarse of a measurement? You could use picoseconds. No matter what, if you're storing arbitrary real numbers in a fixed number of bits, you're going to have some rounding error. Choose enough bits to make your representation "good enough" or, say, "better than your instruments, anyway". Then use integers. They're simpler and much more efficient than floats/doubles.
Portable Sink
When plumbing is an issue and passing inspection is a must, the Portable Sink comes to the rescue. Our high-quality portable sinks provide a practical solution for any daycare, food service business or medical office.
Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley:

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-ACM-Press/dp/02...
The fix for tipjoy IMHO: Instead to tip contents you can already see turn this into "you can download after this minimal tip amount" for free software, ebooks, ...

A lot of opensource developers will be happy to make it possible to generate some little earning per download (even 20 cents is enough sometimes). This is going to fix a huge problem, but how it is today tipjoy is not going to fix nothing.

Example, Visitors (http://hping.org/visitors) is an open source web log analyzer I wrote some time ago, it is free for Unix users, but the Windows binary costs 8 EUR, still people constantly purchased it in the latest two years. Now immagine that instead I could get 20 cents from everybody is downloading the latest version both for Unix or Windows while I take all the past versions free. This makes sense, you can try the product very well using past versions and 20 cents is very cheap still will probably be the same as a 8 EUR payment for the windows binary.

Also this forces developers to put something cool inside every new release.

Now if tipjoy don't want to introduce this form of payment somebody else should do this prodcut: take in mind that it is absolutely vital that the service will host the file and make available it for download automagically when the use pays. No work from the point of view of the developers, no APIs, it's not like paypal, it's a different thing.

My 20 cents ;)
Why hackers FLOSS
Things The Grandchildren Should Know - Mark Oliver Everett (as in son of Hugh Everett, many-worlds theorem physicist)
yes, it's a generalisation. yes, oxbridgians put both legs into a trouser. however the system does build up palpable differences in ability between a general oxford student and someone just as smart who ends up somewhere else.

But the bulk of the post is about the effect of working with well schooled individuals - if you're not as smart then copying their mannerisms can often be a world of hurt for all.
I'm guessing that he's saying binary doesn't represent all numbers properly so if you need it to be absolutely accurate, you need to have a custom data type. Making it picoseconds doesn't help.

Same problem with money - it's a very bad idea to use floats etc for money.
http://bugmenot.com

However, NYT regularly blocks usernames that appear on bugmenot, so pretty much every time I go to nyt.com I have to go to bugmetnot.

It would be much easier just to register for NYT, but I continue to use bugmenot out of principle.
Also... be careful when buying domain names that were used previously. I once picked up an just-expired domain name that I thought was nice and then it took me 2 years (!) to get Google to index it. I don't know what the problem was, because archive.org showed it was just a generic search page previously. At that time I registered a company with the same name and I didn't want to give it up. 2 years wasted struggling for an identity! (Fortunately my business did not depend much on search.)
Unbelievable! I would have fixed that in less than one minute!
> the system does build up palpable differences in ability between a general oxford student and someone just as smart who ends up somewhere else

I think this is just plain false. There are plenty of truly smart people at all universities and the quality of teaching doesn't vary much across universities. The only real difference between Oxbridge and rest is that they're harder to get into. Once you're in they're much the same.

The benefit you will get out of any teaching institution will directly correlate with the effort you put in.
No. One way in which we differ considerably from Yelp is that the venue itself produces the initial content. The profiles are fuller and more meaningful because the venues are building the initial product rather than users. Very few Yelp pages, for example, have any photos. When a venue is paying for inclusion in this service, they are more attentive to the page than a user.

Every venue on our web application has people behind it, working at the venue, who are reading the user reviews, adding content, creating announcements, writing a short description of the place, uploading pictures of products or services they offer, and describing their venue using up to fifty tags.

Users can do many of these things, too, but the initial set of content is created by the venue.
So what's the difference to paypal then?
If you ahve to cashout to paypal, why not add a donate paypal button at your website instead of te tipjoy button.
I think 2 is a great idea! ( allthough hardly doable as another person already explained)
Or countries close to each other simply have more in common with each other culturally. This would result in something looking like "bloc voting" as well.

Does anyone even think it's possible to determine a songs "rating" objectively?
I covered that. There is no "absolutely accurate" in a finite number of bits, no matter what data type you use. In N bits, you can't store more than 2^N distinct numbers, and there happen to be a lot more than 2^N distinct numbers, even between 0 and 1. You have to choose your margin for error and be prepared to live with it (or use a variable width format).
Thanks for comments. The aim is to avoid the timeval structure and merge it into one basic type value. Consider it as a time stamp value. The timeval struct is very uncomfortable when dealing with time computation. It is even error prone once we have to deal with microseconds. While the precision is well defined, the covered time span is limited. BTW, the limit is not that far anymore.

Converting to calendar time is not an issue as long as one can extract time in second units from the time value. After adjusting to the right epoch one can use the existing conversion functions.

The idea to use doubles to encode time came from some API in windows. Is it patented ? ;-) Its advantage is that one can represent nearly any time value. The disadventage is the varying precision.

My use case is for time stamps and thus integer or fixed point would be preferable. I would prefer the fixed point using seconds as units. The problem is to implement some arithmetic operations like multiplication and division by a decimal scalar.
I'm not the one who modded you down, but I'll bite.

You have a problem with the author's irreverence towards virus outbreaks in Africa. Regardless of whether this is "correct", it is not of interest to (some large proportion of) readers here.

If you want to criticise the authors' tone, the comments attached to his own blog may be a more effective venue.
Ask YC: Robokill & Payment Systems
Hi Everyone,

We've just released our biggest flash game yet at Rock Solid Arcade, an RPG shooter, and I wanted to get your feedback on it (I thought it was something this crowd would be into). It's kind of a big leap for us because we're transitioning to an essentially fremium model for Flash games, and I wanted to make sure everything is perfect. I'd especially like to get your feedback on value proposition and the clarity of the upsell. We're giving away about 40% of the full game.

Next step for those that are interested is probably a more engaging site. Not enough hours in the day. :(

Link:
http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/games/robokill/

Screenshots:
http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/static/robokill/shot1.jpg

http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/static/robokill/shot2.jpg

http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/static/robokill/shot3.jpg

Thanks very much for you time!
There are lot of immigrants from Balkans in Germany, France, Spain, UK, etc. and they vote for the countries of they origin.
He's talking about grids for page layout, not for columns of data.

Example: http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2007/0402_layers_cake.ph...
Infection Control
When it comes to germ prevention and infection control, there is no such thing as too safe. These 200ppm Quaternary Sanitizer Steramine packs have industrial strength power to effectively eliminate odors, bacteria and harsh waste. Perfect for hospitals, daycares, preschools or food service.
Fully agree. The time resolution I would be interested in are nanoseconds. Using 64bit signed integer values with nanoseconds as units I could cover a +/- 292 years which is far enough. I could then afford to keep the unix time_t epoch.
Yes. The other Paul's advice covers a different ground.

Though Paul D. Windsor, Esq., the lawyer, writes:

'In my profession, [starting with your own proposal] is known as "controlling the document." It is often true that he who controls the document controls the deal. Psychologically, if the negotiation begins with with your proposals, it's likely to proceed from your perspective and not the other guy's. The end result is much more likely to be in your favor under such circumstances. Most people in the real world are too lazy to draft their own contracts and, if they do, often do a poor job. Always be the first to present the contract. By doing so, you are taking the initiative in setting the terms of the deal for the remainder of the negotiations.'
That's what I wanted to know. The great-grand-mother-post gave the impression that it might be possible.

But I realize now - it was not addressing ordinary users in the first place.
You know that ebola has basically been cured? It was funded by the US government for military purposes, I think they are stockpiling the vaccine in case ebola is ever used as a biological weapon. http://www.thinkgene.com/vaccine-for-ebola-virus/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#Recent_outbreaks In the scheme of things though, Ebola is absolutely nothing compared to the horror of AIDS...
You are probably right.

His Zen-inspiration is not direct, though. He takes his theme from Gödel, Escher, Bach that uses koans in a similar manner in one part of the book.

You can have a look at the very insightful design history (http://www.koryheath.com/games/zendo/design-history).
And it's not that self-taught always means lower class, it's just that autodidact always means higher class. There must be a better word in English for the type of distinction in words I am describing here, maybe someone can enlighten me...
Extending the user model: profiles in Django
Some Bongard Problems
I'm sad to see the Eurovision song contest mentioned here, not because I don't think this post has a place on HN because now our terrible secret has been revealed.
I think this article just shows how co-dependent some of us are on the network. Other bloggers leaving comments in this post showing empathy "how horrible" it must have been. I have an addictive personality and it scares me how much you can live your life on the net. Which is why I try to avoid twitter/RSS readers/FB. Remember when Angela in the movie The Net (played by Speed's Sandra Bullock) had her identity erased by the bad guys?
As far as I remember, this have been called "micropayments dream"...At the early stage of the internet, publishing houses wanted to make profit from publishing content on the web. At first, they were hesitant to put it on for free, but when they realized that not enough people will pay for the access, they put their hope into micropayments.

Unfortunately, it never worked too well, and in my opinion the main reason is that Internet culture is based on free sharing of information. I wish this company success, but I wouldn't invest into them myself. I can't pinpoint why exactly, but the very concept seems faulty to me.
Incidentally, this is exactly what the essay advocates. So maxklein and brianr are arguing non-existant points.
Is a solution for money to convert everything to cents?
So, moving away from the point of the post- yes there are many smart & cool CTOs, CEOs & MDs that didn't go to Oxbridge.

But what you learn at uni is proportional to delta^2 in the intelligences of the people around you. If it's harder to get in, the people are smarter, and you learn more. There's less drag, classes move faster. You don't need to be a-CEO-level-handshaker to meet the right people, because there are so many. Oxbridge have obscene resources - classes to print your own chips or 1:2 tuition that the next layer of universities down don't get.

There is a mini-valley-effect going on there, that makes it much more likely for someone to act smart if they've been to an elitist university.

Yes I'm bitter. (Yes they rejected me)
I had similar problems as well, got myself a better keyboard (Apple) and carry it everywhere. Do not type on your laptop's keyboard!

Also, don't assume that you can code for hours on end, take a break.
A Browser Renaissance?
Most of the time video comments are useless, and worse, degrade the user's experience.

With text comments I can quickly scan the comments for interesting bits. With video comments I'm at the mercy of the commenter. I have to sit through the whole thing, watching it at whatever speed they choose to speak at rather than whatever speed I can read/scan text. It's also unsearchable.

Additionally, I think people tend to ramble more when they speak than when they're writing text that they can go back and edit.

Most of the time video just doesn't add anything to the discussion. Maybe they would be useful if the commenter needs to physically demonstrate something, or sing or recite a poem or something. But that's not the common case.

Now, if you could automatically transcribe the words from video comments and post it alongside the video (thus making watching the video optional) I wouldn't be so opposed to it. Video certainly has the potential to make the conversation a bit more personal. Sometimes it's nice to put a face to a name/comment (which could also help deter trolls)

(perhaps some sort of combination of speech recognition and crowd-sourcing could be used to transcribe video comments...)
I suppose he wants not to multiply a date, but a time interval.
Colorful Hackers that you may not know !!
# A white hat hacker or ethical hacker is someone who breaks security but does so for non-malicious reasons

# A grey hat hacker is a hacker of ambiguous ethics and/or borderline legality

# A blue hat hacker is someone from outside computer security consulting firms who is used to bug-test a system before its launch

# A black hat hacker is someone who subverts computer security without authorisation or who uses technology for subverse activities

# A script kiddie is a person, usually not an expert in computer security, who breaks into computer systems by using pre-packaged automated tools written by others

# A hacktivist is a hacker who uses technology to announce a political message.

Source: http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/may/26spec.htm
From http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/:

On the advice of our designers, the 100% grid (#doc3) has 10px of margin on the left and right sides. This prevents the content from bleeding into the browser's chrome. If you prefer, you can set it back to zero by adding this to your document:

#doc3 {margin:auto;}
The spirit of the game
Rigged ? I don't think that anyone is meddling with tele-voting. However, it is true that some people vote accordingly to nationality more than to song quality. The principle is the same as in politics, where people are more likely to support someone from their state, regardless of his/hers views. Nothing new here, move on.

And, if I understand eurovision voting correctly, at least top 5 songs need many more points than just those of neighbouring countries.