skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with the exercising part. Playing pick-up and adult league sports around town is far more satisfying and less boring than an elliptical or treadmill machine. As a bonus, you get to satisfy some of your social needs as well.

I play Ultimate Frisbee and Basketball. I sucked at first, but eventually it taught my brain to think and react in new ways and I got better - which is pretty cool! For a guy like me who moves to a new city every two years, the social benefit of being part of the Ultimate Frisbee network cannot be overstated.
These days, random joe blogger has more credibility than Congress.

Lots of people aren't happy with President Bush - he's got approval ratings somewhere in the low thirties, I think. Even less people are happy with Congress - they were in the 14% ballpark recently. I'm tired of the whole lot. There are some good Republicans, but I'd sacrifice them to wipe the slate clean.

Term limits!
Clay Shirky.
Well thinking about Spring, it does a lot of wiring behind the scenes. How would you do that with Python? What does the factory_client method do?

I don't think Java Reflection is a/the problem.
"The Cholera Diet"

There used to be a diet bar named "Ayds".

In the early 80's people just stopped buying them. Nobody wanted Ayds anymore.
There is simply no way this will get any traction in court.
Ask HN: Instant Twitter Clone with WordPress?
Isn't all that's required a WordPress Plugin that gives you a page showing the latest posts from blogs on your blogroll, and you have a Twitter clone that people could host on their own servers?

Could throw in some fancy stuff like avatars for the blogs and practical "follow" buttons, but still...

Of course it probably wouldn't scale at first, either, but I think a solution for scaling would be easier to find.

Since Twitter also has RSS feeds, perhaps it could even integrate with Twitter out of the box.

Blogs don't have a "xyz is following you" thing, but perhaps Trackbacks would be sufficient.
I love Shirky. His essay on micropayments heavily influenced the dead simple Tipjoy interface:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
See the Dilbert toon on fungibility:http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-02-19/
you can use our service to find one (we currently only have two partners right now).

http://www.quotesignal.com

And when you do get a quote from someone, use this tool to rate it:

http://www.quotesignal.com/merchant-account-comparison-calcu...

EDIT: I know it's bad form to complain about downmods. This isn't a complaint just a statement that I'm flummoxed as to why this would be voted down.
Which means little once the predictions start coming true. Look around, peak oil isn't really a prediction any more, it's happening, demand has sky rocketed beyond what supply can handle. When pieces of sky are hitting you in the head you don't stand around questioning Chicken Little's ideology
Kleiner's Pick for the Killer iPhone App
Windows chief talks '7'
Processing.js Tower Defense
Uh, sorry. I think you've got it completely backwards. Why do you think the framers were so concerned about being "entangled in foreign alliances"? The kind of entanglements you propose will prevent war are exactly the kind we should be avoiding because they could very well draw us into wars we don't want to be in.

"Energy Independence" is probably a misnomer - but the point is to change our economics so that we aren't forced to provide advantage to our geostrategic adversaries. Because our economy is so dependent on oil, we currently have little choice but to fund those who currently fund our (the U.S. and the rest of the West) enemies. The desire is simply to make oil a commodity like any other, and not one that can make or break the U.S. In other words, we need something to give us the ability to tell the Saudis to kiss off.
I don't think laypeople should decide when doctors are overprescribing. That's like new age people who think quantum physics is a scientific way of stating their religious superstitions without understanding the math.

The problem isn't so much with doctors as it is with patients who see ads for made up conditions on TV and try to talk their way into samples with the talk to your doctor guides to scoring drugs. Ban advertising, ban bribing doctors to push pharma junk, the problem largely dissolves.

(I accidently pushed to downmod instead of upmod you, sorry. I will go upmod 2 others.)
The real implications of the rise of internet computing
WiFi startup proposes free wireless network for BART riders
Not that I disagree, but what makes you think Congress will ever vote themselves out of office with term limits?
If you're looking for another secret comic, try We The Robots (http://www.wetherobots.com/). I think it's just as funny as xkcd although there's not much math or programming humor.
There are already $30,000 electric cars with dandy range for commuting. (The Aptera.) These are only two seat, but they would suit my needs just fine. It seems reasonable that this could hit $20,000 if produced in volume.

A more realistic goal would be the incremental replacement of internal combustion cars with electric cars. Something like 30% in 10 years would be a tremendous good and would seem possible. I think the ultimate goal should be 85% electric vehicle use. I suspect that there will be a last 15% of uses for which the IC engine will still be the most cost effective solution.
Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers
Tipjoy is confronting a hard problem, but not in the technology space. They are trying to create a useful convenient payment mechanism without running afoul of finance laws. I don't envy them. There's a reason why all banks are the same, and basically the same as they were decades ago.
old but gold.
NASA sends “The Weather Rock” to Mars
why should i care, i have the body of a god : http://www.huongsengrand.com/
Google Is Right About This: YouTube Lawsuit Threatens The Net
I doubt Fischer found the Iris dataset boring.
I tried to sign up, but got an error...

System Error

* Oops! It looks like there was an error.
Check out the ACM publications: http://www.acm.org/publications

The Queue has decent stuff, but the real meat is looking at conference proceedings.
Obama uses viral marketing to raise money and love
What most people who have never counted calories don't realize is that once you know general counts for the foods you consume the most and once you realize what portion size corresponds to those calories, you're not doing that much counting. The reason is that most of us tend to eat the same types of food, You're only learning a bit at the beginning. After that, there is very little thought that goes into it and it becomes almost second nature because you get used to specific portion sizes for the main staples in your diet. You just have to be a little more careful of those "indulgence" meals or days or anything that might throw your count way off.
Authorize.net - Game, Set, Match.
Silly Walks Generator
Viva la revolution!
Dennis Ritchie: Dabbling in Cryptography
mercurial as well.
When User-Generated Content Goes Bad
You'd have to go to a medical library to do research, or pay 15 dollars per article. There are easily 2 or 3 hundred bucks worth of journal articles (at 15 or 20 a pop) that are required reading. The most valuable articles will be studies on medication adherence protocols that failed, and then reasons for non adherence, and then consequences of non adherence. For some reason, the articles on non adherence for diabetes and AIDS were the most useful articles in the consequences catagory. I would suggest combining the research with reading the first 2 large sections of the HIG. They are complimentary, in that the HIG gives principles for correctly presenting information, and the research points out what information to present, how and why the current system fails, etc. You should also find articles describing the current best practices for this problem. I almost cried when I read a 2007 group health article on current best practices (which are really laughably weak).

I'm not feeling inclined to just hand over all of my cites. There are too many and it would take too long to sort through. But, I'll see if I can dig up a couple of the meta studies that have further links to other research in them later tonight. If you have those and some motivation, you can fill in the rest.

How can you start a project like this without having already encountered all that research? I don't understand. I went and sequestered myself away for a month and researched and read all that stuff. The more I read about the problem, the more I was convinced my solution worked and is desperately needed. But many of the ideas I had intuitively changed when I did the boring work of reading medical journals all the time.
Or:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
That is the most retarded use of flash ever.
Bill Gates personally quashed Microsoft-Yahoo merger
I've been following The Hacker's Diet (had 7kg to lose to get to my 'ideal' weight) and it's been relatively easy. At some point I plan to blog all the data, but I've been consistently losing about 0.6kg per week since I started 5 weeks ago.

Quick summary of what has worked for me:

1. Stopped eating anything between meals. I probably cut out 12 cans of Coke, 2 chocolate bars, and 2 cakes/treats per week. I estimate this at 2,640 kcal alone

2. Started listening to my stomach so that I'd stop eating when I was full, and didn't take second helpings that I didn't actually need.

3. Have been following the exercise plan and now avoid taking lifts or escalators.

4. I am not counting calories for my meals since excluding my between meals rubbish I eat fairly balanced food.

Also I'm saving money... basically I'm losing weight, feeling better and saving about 26 Euro per week. Since I plan to cut out that stuff permanently I'll be able to afford a spanking new iPhone after 6 months.

Lose Weight, Save Money, Feel Better, Get an iPhone!
Ask PG: Why haven't you fixed the "Unknown or expired link" problem?
What gives Paul? This seems like a pretty simple thing to fix, and it's been complained about steadily for months now.

I find it hard to believe that you have become as deaf to your users' complaints as the Microsoft's of the world. Surely this has just been overlooked. Am I wrong?

Any thoughts from anybody else?
You assume males can't count calories. I know plenty who can, and do when the circumstances require it.

Literally counting every calorie gets old quick, but I think everyone should be able to estimate their calorie intake. It doesn't take long to calibrate your own intuition; after a week of paying close attention, most people should be able to guess the calorie contents of a plate of food.
When writing a game, I tend to have a singleton "Game" or "World" class (well, actually a static class, I don't bother with all the getInstance() crap), and from there a bunch of proper classes all "owned" by Game. Now, I'm basically using static classes as a namespace here, but is this really that harmful? If so, what options do I have?
Yes I think so - your example will still print "after the block x is 5", but in that case that probably is what you would expect.

Maybe my head has just gone blank, but I cannot think of a way to get a local called 'x' inside that block that is in scope only within the block.

In Perl you would have done

my $x = 5;
foreach my $i in (1..5) {
my $x = $i;
...
}

And it would have given you a new 'block local' and left your original x alone, but I cannot think of how you can do the equivalent of 'my' in Ruby ...
I think you could count it as a business model: stay alive and thriving long enough to become an attractive acquisition target. And sure it's a good strategy -- at least, others are using it pretty well. Is justin.tv really planning to stage an IPO?
The Mainstream-ification of GPS
Seems pretty cool, but I was actually more impressed by the "Plain English/Web 2.0-Speak" toggle, a feature I think many sites need to implement.
If you're building something that might only be attractive to one or two buyers, but there's a pretty good chance those buyers would buy should you make the product attractive enough, isn't that a reasonable strategy? (Maybe not quite a sure thing.)
Mindfulness meditation: Lotus therapy
Um, fuck you. Really, I mean it. My mom, a single mother, worked full time doing hard physical labor in a bakery. Her back is still sore from all the hard work she did to raise me and my brother. We lived in cheap housing, paycheck to paycheck for years, and went to pretty crappy public schools. I don't see how you get anything about economic class from the word I used.

We were poor growing up. I liked to read. I learned big words when I read, and I use them when I communicate. End of story.
This is particularly true for programming languages. What makes a programming language valuable? One factor is the libraries available to it. The more high-quality open libraries available, the better. The more active a programmer community, the better its libraries. It's very similar to what makes any website with a social component valuable.

Programming languages are social and cultural constructs as much as technological.
Selling the company: that's not a rare event. An IPO: that's like becoming an actor with the intent of being the next Tom Cruise. There are many, many buyers out there, hardly just Google. If you make something that people need (not merely what they think they want, but what they need) then you will be able to sell.
it's the continuations. you are wrong. it's not a simple fix.
Going out on a limb a little, I would say in most areas (aside from the few that always seem to be in the headlines around here), no-one has really bothered applying even the basic insights of CS, math, and engineering.

There are just so many "backwater" areas of the business and science worlds, ripe for optimization, and not enough CS types with strong fundamental skills, attacking them. I guess they are all concentrated in the "hot" companies and focussed on the "hot" areas instead. =)

I was very surprised when I realized this. It was kinda akin to learning Santa wasn't real (edit: but in reverse!)

Its hard to see these opportunities from the surface, I guess they are like deep water fish - so hitch a ride with a submarine =p and start with one based on the contacts you have.
QOTD:"It is important to keep in mind how useless this information is."
Also if you're using subscriptions do the same but instead of setting country set the lc variable on your form to the country you want.
...but that essay basically says micropayments are dead and will never stand a chance?
Large US corporations monitor their employees' emails
What if pigs could fly?

EDIT

To clarify, it's ridiculous to just make a conjecture like this and build a case around it. The same thing could be done for anything else, not just gas and the current state of the economy. If the foundation of the article is this wild, then any of its conclusions are just as off-base and pointless.
AnswerOil Lubricates Your Gadget Purchases
If gas was $100 a gallon, I'd have an electric car and hopefully only one car. The real changes would come from society at large. I hope employers would get serious about telecommuting, for as many employees as possible. Maybe they'd get more serious about using satellite offices.

I'd use electronic means to communicate more and more and I assume others would as well. It would have to bridge the gap of distance that separates us. I'd probably get to know my neighbors a lot better as well. I'd go local for more than food. I'd have no choice.
Agree, but the old site is inaccessible.
I reckon you guys just need critical mass. Once the widget is everywhere, people won't have a problem going into credit on their TipJoy account. Once you've got that, it will be practical to use TipJoy for payment of content, etc.
The easiest fix would be to get rid of the continuations. It would be just as easy to encode the comment_id in a form field as millions of other webpages do.
I don't know. You can amend the constitution without congress, but that would require quite a lot of organization and "grass-roots" (I hate the phrase, but to use another cliche, it's used for lack of a better one) efforts. You could probably get started by picking off a few active and former members of congress to sort of "lead the charge", but the effort would have to be sustained through several election cycles, I think. You'd also have to make sure you leverage the precedent set by the 22nd amendment (presidential term limit).

It's a bootstrapping problem, and a particularly difficult one because there is a reasonable argument against it (people should be free to elect whomever they want).
Of course there are better options than to use oil to generate electricity. But what I am interested in is: what is more energy efficient? x million combustion engines or a few centralized power station plus x million electric cars?
Educate the CPS newbie, here: why do continuations make this difficult?
I guess it will fly in your face once you'll try to create multiplayer games and serve several games at the same time?

What do you gain from making a game a singleton?
factory_client does whatever you want it to do - it's just the method that would call your Abstract Factory or Factory Method or whatever.

I've never used Spring, but I assume that the wiring it does is similar to JSF managed beans, eg. you give it an XML config file and it takes care of creating the appropriate Java objects from that. As for how you'd do it in Python - you wouldn't. To quote Phillip Eby: "XML is not the answer. It is not even the question."

http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html

That's because XML is usually easier to write than Java but harder to write than Python, so you're better off just writing the Python.

You'd write your classes, and then stick them in a data structure somewhere. You could even use the package structure of your app as that data structure - have the client code receive a module (modules and packages are first-class in Python), then use getattr to pull out the class object. Then when you have a class object, you call it to create a new instance.

I suppose if you want some security guarantees, you'd explicitly specify the classes that may be passed in to the method. For example, in my own app, I have a bunch of classes that essentially represent language constructs in a visual domain-specific language, each of which has a "default" value so that when the user's clicking away they don't have to type in code from scratch. I wanted to expose these defaults to JavaScript, the language of the UI. So I put together a dictionary of the classes that I want exposed, then loop through it, instantiate each class as the default, encode each object as a plain old dictionary (they all have a 'props' method that returns the object represented as a JSON-suitable dictionary), and JSON-encode the whole mess. It totals like 5 lines for the whole thing, not counting the list of classes to be exposed.
I found the comparison with Microsoft a bit ridiculous.
Because it's a powerful paradigm used in the wrong place.
I had the same thought: does the web guy who did this site know about all those algorithms? (im from Mexico, you see all kind of crapy sites here)
yes I've been confused about the odd way HN handles pagination. Its retarded at the most basic level that hitting Next gives an error page because some code went stale.
Agreed. I started counting calories a couple weeks ago. Once you get the hang of it, you can estimate pretty well. In most cases, you don't need to know _exactly_ how many calories you take in. Ballpark works just as well. If you're coming close to the limits you set for yourself, stop eating.
It is in fact a simple fix. You just add timeouts. I already did it for the application form.

The real answer to the question is: because I have other things to do besides work on cosmetic bug fixes. I'll get to it at some point. In the meantime, please stop submitting "stories" about this. If you discover an important bug, send me an email. Otherwise the place for feature requests and minor bug reports is the feature request page; there is a link to it at the bottom of the front page.
Because multiply invokable continuations have a memory cost associated with them. You need to know when to expire them so that you can reclaim memory.

If you didn't do this, every session would take up memory on the system that was never released.

That said, the situation could be handled more gracefully by keeping fallback information squirreled away somewhere.
Well in that case, I'd have a Server class and a Client class. One handles logic and the other handles display and input.

And actually, for my last little prototype (now that I think about it), I didn't make it a singleton, I just had a single public instance of it.

Question retracted.
Nine lessons from the first Internet bubble
>In other words, we need something to give us the ability to tell the Saudis to kiss off.

And then we can invade the Saudis! Brilliant!
I hope most people will be biking long before we get close to that level:

http://bikeworker.blogspot.com/
FriendFeed Meetup
Does the FaceBook/OpenSocial meetup also extend into FriendFeed? If not, is anyone in the south bay interested in a FriendFeed meetup?
http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com

They offer everything the big dogs do, but their staff is incredibly helpful and attentive. We use them on FamSpam and GitHub.

I wouldn't find the merchant with the lowest rates, find the one you like the most. As your business grows, you can always renegotiate your rates.
They aren't carrying 50 pounds of extra flab ANYMORE. They don't just magically start with muscle and low body fat.

I started by losing 70 lbs of computer guy gut. And when it comes to keeping track of everything, if you're not going to actually do it right, why start?
Since there were so many scaremongering articles in the news lately, I thought about the same problem recently.

I guess I should be worried, but honestly my first thought is always "finally we'll get rid of those pesky cars". I hate cars so much (swallowing their exhausts every day cycling to work), that I think my joy over car-free cities will outweigh most downsides of the expensive energy.

Personally I don't need a car, I could probably do without a fridge, and I don't really need long distance travel very much. Heating could be a problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oil_Prices_1861_2007.svg

Demand trails price and production trails demand by several years and it's related to politics. So it's hard to make real predictions. In the end politics plays a huge role in today’s oil prices and long term we can manufacture it from other sources for less than 200$ per barrel. Granted we use a lot of oil so infrastructure costs are huge so the major players are going to be vary conservative.
There's all the difference in the world between one and two. If there's just one, you're pretty much at their mercy. They can wait you out. The problem with two is that it's next to one. If one of the two has a bad year and stops buying startups, you're now down to one.

So much for microstrategy. The bigger problem is that if you're making something only one acquirer would want, it's probably not important technology.
1. How do you know that the foundation of this article is wild?

2. Have you read the article? It's a thought experiment. It's meant to provoke thought and discussion. He's asking people to consider and share what they would do if gas hit a price where business as usual was clearly untenable and there would be no choice but to change consumption patterns.