skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that answer is generally a good one. But when you're simply doing development and haven't launched yet, a hosted developer account can take a lot of headache out of hosting.

I don't want to be the UNIX admin for my VPS when I'm focused on development. So a REALLY important feature of any hosting provider for me is the ability to start on a $5 shared server account, and eventually ramp it to a 1024MB VPS, painlessly.
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> Somewhat ironically, Erlang was released by Ericsson as open source in 1998 because an internal executive decision was made to go with "standards" instead.

Nice technical trivial pursuit factoid
Not a big deal, but a cool idea. I'll be sure to implement this next time I program auto complete.
Yeah, the other thing is that this is only a promotional offer good until August. The problem of the lack of competition in Canada and carriers being able to do whatever they want is unaddressed.
My goodness! A study commissioned in India, a nation which must choose between an order-of-magnitude increase in CO2 emissions or remaining far longer in relative poverty, determined that raising CO2 emissions are just fine. I'm not qualified to comment on climate science, but it doesn't take a clinical psychologist to spot the conflict of interests.
Man, if I could only figure out what's launching.
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Churchill lived for 90 years fat as a pig and smoking like a crack whore.

I call bullshit and a way to cut food production in half by persuading everybody to eat less.

Stress kills, food doesn't.
I'm thinking about taking the Bolt Bus over from Boston. I know Radegast well, I actually used to date a waitress there.
My last name is "Higginbotham", I have a very slight Southern accent and say "y'all", and I look very Asian because I'm half Vietnamese. Most of the people I do work for I never see in person, but it's often amusing when I do meet them.
If you agree with this line of thinking: The Great Moderation - http://www.winterspeak.com/2008_07_01_archive.html#150265996...
then the real issue is relative rates of consumption.
I can confirm that SimpleDB is Erlang (with Berkeley DB as the persistence engine), or at least I can say that one of the lead developers of SimpleDB has told me that this is the case.
Wonder if this was no-limit hold em? If it is it's impressive. If not well the probabilities are not that challenging.
Higginbotham is an awesome name!
Best Buy Is Selling Ubuntu
Compiz Fusion : An Unparalleled 3D Environment
> BioTools Inc. (Edmonton, Alberta) has built previous versions of Polaris into a downloadable poker coach called the Poker Academy.
Not sure about the GUI... The browser looks terrible (http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/open-moko-software.media/o...) with it's two scrollers.
What are you talking about? Pets can't drive!
I think 200 nipples is the biggest factor of this thing... Forget about selling stuff to corporate clients (I'd rather buy somewhere else than explain to my A/P person why I bought something at "200 nipples" and can she please pay the bill).

Hopefully these guys have figured out how they are going to beat a cafepress self-generated unique design.

Who knows, hopefully this thing can go beyond it's name and they have their business model in order. Best of luck to them.
This is evidence of nothing except that one number looks more volatile than other numbers if you measure that number more frequently.

"Since 2006, oil prices have risen 100%, and corn is up 300%. But onion prices soared 400% between October 2006 and April 2007, when weather reduced crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only to crash 96% by March 2008 on overproduction and then rebound 300% by this past April."

I mean, seriously? For oil and corn they compare two points, but for onions they compare October 2006-April 2007, April 2007 - March 2008, and March 2008 - April 2008.

I could just as easily look at the change in onion prices between October 2006 and now, and then pick 3 arbitrary dates when oil prices hit extremes, to "prove" how having a futures market makes prices more volatile.
Auto-configuring virtual clusters
It's weird that the color for the winner is red and looser green. It's kinda counter intuitive from what we are used to (ex: traffic lights).
"We're the CryptoKids and we love cryptography!"

Haha. It's like a parody of itself.
Would you agree with me that they are playing a different game?

If you remove the human element, the players can't use one of their skills.
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I love regular expressions as much as anybody, but I never understood why people wrote code like that.

r"\s" is repeated 6 times in there, each time with a comment. Is there a reason nobody uses DRY when writing a regexp?

spaces = r"\s*"
number = r"([-+]?\d+)"
bracket = r"([\[\]])"
finder = re.compile(spaces.join(["^", bracket, number, ",", number, bracket, "$"]))
That's a lot of steps.
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"UPDATE: Yahoo emphatically denies the Wall Street rumor that Jerry Yang is planning to resign."

When he resigns, I assume we'll hear about it. Until then, is it really worth re-hashing again?

(Can you re-hash something again, for that matter? Is it re-re-hashing?)
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Crazy enough to kill your wife -- yes.
Medialets Launches iPhone Ad Platform: Think DoubleClick for iPhone Apps
For some silly reason it didn't work for me(FF 3.0rc2), but is it similar to the auto complete in the new firefox address bar? I've found the new address bar to be a huge improvement over the old style of autocomplete.
IE6 Independence?  (not so much, if you're mainstream)
Regarding the 'random save coin toss' question: I suspect juries would adjust, and start convicting with less certainty, if they thought there was a random chance those they found guilty would still go free.
Mapstraction - Javascript mapping abstraction library
You're probably thinking of Tesseract.

I've actually been doing some work with various OCR tools the past few days. Tesseract and Ocropus didn't work very well for me, but I don't think mine is the intended use. I have a need to identify images that contain text (which could be on top of a complex background) and most OCR applications are better suited for reading scanned documents. So far GOCR has produced the best results for me.

I found an article a couple weeks ago comparing a few OCR applications for scanning documents that someone might find interesting: http://www.linux.com/feature/138511

OCR quality is heavily dependent on font type, font size and contrast, but for many typed documents Ocropus and Tesseract do a pretty decent job.
It just happened to be that the page on the left would always be green, the page on the right would always be red... It doesn't look dependent on winner or loser.
Had he made money on his trade, he'll most probably just be one of the nameless millionaires (billionaires?) making a killing on the markets on a regular basis.

Trading can teach you a lot about doing business - put your money where your mouth is; high risk, high returns; trade like you don't need the money.

Maybe one thing he should have learned first though was - never trade anything you can't afford to lose.

Bing
why exactly would you be buying funny/shocking tshirts on your corporate account?
There's one here in Truckee, CA.
Oh, I guess I was unlucky... Still an odd behavior.
Yes, if only the CRTC tried to do something.

Hopefully the turnout of the wireless spectrum auction (http://agora.ic.gc.ca/AuctionGCLF_BTS/bidderResults.cfm) will be beneficial.
Music, Games, TV & Film have all failed to stop piracy, can sport do any better?
I don't understand why the tech media is making such a big deal out of this. The FSF clearly allows for this in their licensing. They could charge $100 or $1,000 for this if they felt like it, as long as they are not attempting to close its source.
The selective timeframes showcase the volatility. If a security moves 5 points in a week, and a year later it moves 5 points in a day, it becomes more volatile.

Going up 400% in half a year versus 300% in two years is pretty volatile.

That being said, they probably use bad stats to dumb it down for the average reader. What you want to look at is the {rolling stDev, average true range, volume} to get a better feel for it.

Also, it's happened in other commodities that you can trade contracts on, but they are so thinly traded that they can make really big moves.
"Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.

2) Keep it simple.

3) No manual intervention"
You hope he lives five billion years so that he can see the sun become a red giant?

Seriously, everyday 95+ temperatures in anyone's lifetime? Ridiculous exaggerations like that are the reason that overdone backlash articles like this exist.
It wasn't his fund though; he lost investors money (plus, obviously, what would have been his bonus). It's the fundamental problem plaguing investment banks and hedge funds: you're rewarded ridiculously well for exceptional performance and punished very little for poor performance. This encourages taking substantial amounts of risk in the name of superior returns.

Hunter is set for life and never has to work again. The legal crap will be tied in court for a while as bureaucratic shitkickers shuffle papers around and Hunter will eventually "admit no wrong doing but pay some nominal fine". It's the SEC special.
i have a small slice on which i run pretty much everything i have until it needs its own server. turns out to be cheaper than buying a bunch of tiny hosting accounts for small, stupid projects (i have project ADD sometimes)

just my $0.02, though.
How can they remove excess credit? If they do, it would collapse the financial industry. That's why they had to bail out BSC.
Learning from "bad" UI (37signals on TripLog)
Amen. They need to stop OTC trading by big firms. One of the main perpetraders (get it?) is InterContinentalExchange.

There's nothing wrong with having a market. But the market has to be open for everyone.
Hahaha, I knew this would be an Andrew Bolt article as soon as I saw it was news.com.au.

My brother sends me his stuff all the time. He makes some salient points, but in general he's just pissed off that people are taking climate change so seriously.
Ummm, what the hell was that?

Sorry, usually I feel the need to make more intelligent comments than that, but in this case I'm just gonna have to go with "what the hell was that?"
Why unfortunately? What were the prime lessons learned?
The upside is that you can learn to recognize when you're doing this:

Carla: You're from England, huh.
Eric: How'd you guess?
Carla: Because you sound smart even when you say stupid things.
--Cheers
Our startup (http://www.HubSpot.com) originally started in C#/ASP.NET. C# the language is great. ASP.NET, I'm not such a big fan of. They tried too hard to make it resemble the event-driven VB programming model.

We've since decided to make the switch to Java.
There weren't high oil prices in 2000 because there wasn't global demand for oil.

Oil is skyrocketing because we are consuming more oil than producing. On a daily basis.

I won't deny that there's a commodities bubble going on right now. But it's not just hedge funds. You have new ETFs opening up for individual investors that grant exposure to other asset classes, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's giving the smart money the opportunity to bail before the pop.

Bubbles happen. It's part of the market. Regulation or not, they will still occur.
that was painful to read.
But first you need to erect your databases.
Yeah, that's a better analogy, but there's not a good word for that. Urban decay?
"unaccented American"

I think you mean "with a generic region-free American accent".
Morale.
The big trick always seems to be getting the data. Once we've got it, the tools to build an application to analyze it are at the ready. At least they are at the ready for Hacker News readers. :-)
The Importance of Apple
I could totally do the property tax one for LA county (as in, I already have the assessor data in another form on a website).

It's a solid idea. Of course, I don't have the time to...
Exactly. When playing against a machine, a human can't use one of his skills but it doesn't apply anymore. There's no need to read an opponent or employ deception because a machine doesn't understand this.

Any serious poker player knows that the best strategy for winning is to make your opponent make mistakes while minimizing your own. One of the primary tools for accomplishing this is the use of deception.

Once the game is reduced to calculating the odds at any given moment and betting when they're in your favor, even a simple machine should be able to beat a human as long as it makes reliable calculations.

It should really come as no surprise that a machine can beat a human at a task that machines are really good at.
Exactly. A good working environment. Fun. A good employee of the week/month/etc prize. Drawings for events. Giveaways. The list goes on and on....

None of these buys are for a single piece either. That's why corp accounts are good business.
Not all HN readers. :)
Fuck the police? http://youtube.com/watch?v=A05uvpG3cLs
What languages/alphabets does this support?
"Contempt and scorn are appropriate feelings to have for murderers."

Oh really? What about those trained to kill? Such as those in the military?

This is a tangent, but I'm curious...
New Gmail Feature: Watch Over Your Gmail Account Activity
You can't go around dismissing scientific studies just because the authors have a conflict of interest. There's almost always a conflict of interest in any scientific study.

For example in most studies there's an "interesting" result (e.g. method P works, X causes Y, Z is a real phenomenon) that might come out or a "less interesting" result (method P doesn't work, X has nothing to do with Y, Z doesn't really exist). The interesting result is almost always better for the scientist's career.
i think the tech media is making a big deal about it because they're basically scalping the OS, using their big name to make a profit on an item that anyone can request for free.

it 'appears' that they're not burning the cds themselves, they're taking the things that ubuntu ships out on request, putting a price tag on them and putting them on the shelves. it seems predatory.

but, as you said, its legal.

EDIT: jesus tapdancing christ, people, i'm regurgitating the common argument, this is not actually what i believe. calm down.
Just in time for the start of our python project
I just finished the software engineering course at the University of Maryland online. A little after my first year into the program, I got an email out of the blue from the NSA. The email said that because of my GPA and the school I was attending, I qualified for a full-ride scholarship plus $15k a year stipend for my undergrad + grad school.

The only think was, I'd have to let the NSA dictate what classes I took, every summer belonged to them, and I'd owe the NSA 1 year of work for every year that I took the scholarship.

I ran away.
Legg Mason’s Miller to Icahn: Put Up, Or Shut Up
Nope, just hadn't updated my profile. Fixed.
I quit in the middle. I guess I'm an apathetic reader of crappy posts.
I agree that accents are shaped by environment, but as a black person, it's fairly easy to pick out when I'm talking to a black person even when I can't see them (i.e. by phone), just as I could detect a Spanish accent, Indian accent, etc.

That being said, a lot of black people I know change their accents depending on their environment -- work-related, vs. passing time with friends. They (we) are often cognizant of the fact that you need to speak crisp, clear English, as not to be thought stupid.
That, or look for seed funding.
This might create a hacking frenzy. If I was a college kid looking to jump into startups, I would strongly consider doing one of these...
Ruby Messaging Shootout
I stumbled upon this post when I looking for an alternative solution for Amazon SQS.
Well, I've heard that many online players are from Sweden, and I think tour players as well. Other countries have poker rooms and allow online gambling openly.
I honestly believe a contextual UI for TripLog would be an order of magnitude easier to use.

Gmail makes GREAT use of contextual UI elements.
I guess if people want to pay for something that is widely reported as being free, then let them pay for it. Maybe once they become emerged in Ubuntu goodness, they will awake to their error in paying for something they could have burnt themselves for free - likely causing some customer relation issues for good old Best Buy along the way.

On a related note, I would personally like to offer 'air' (not to be confused with AIR), a simple and easy to use fusion of nitrogen and oxygen - for the low price of 19.99!! Also, for a limited time I am offering CrapSquad support for the low-low of 99.99 per service call. Act now!
then the A/P person will probably get a tshirt too, and will know where you got the tshirt from.

But I guess they can always change the company name to something like Tshirts Unlimited, where one of their properties is 200 Nipples
Different than live, really similar to online.

Heads up limit hold'em is also a tiny subset of poker, and (so I've been told) the easiest to program a good AI for. Get that bot beating top players at a 9 handed NL table and I'll stop playing online entirely.
It calculates odds by assigning a range of holdings to you based on your play, so deception is still very useful.
Our invoices appear on your bill as "200 N Shirt" ;-P

Not chasing corporate clients, by the way. Chasing edgy-hip-designer-fashionista-types who like their humor a little edgy and will pay for scarcity (talk about a niche, ha ha).
Tons more info on the site, branding etc. here in this old Hacker News thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232958
(73 comments worth; half of them are me answering questions.)
Your tagline on top doesn't make sense to me, I don't get what the product does and it just confused me a bit more, apart from that confusion the design looks fabulous

Also love the Totes quote .. what the?
Very nice article. I'm in agreement with the sentiments of TripLog's author; the #1 impediment to this kind of data entry is convenience. The goal here is to have users spend as little time as possible using the application.

It could definitely use some improvements visually... but for that application, function should trump form if the two conflict.
All the ellipses...

They're getting to me...

I can't seem to finish my th...
Facebook Connect and all that jazz.
Ha, I was just giving a silly answer to what I thought was a really silly question, but I kind of agree with you about the shotgun approach, provided you're trying to build what people here would call a "lifestyle business" rather than a "startup".
First, who wants a pressed CD? Maybe your conn sucks. Maybe you don't want to mess with BitTorrent. Maybe you can't burn a disc. Maybe you just get the warm and fuzzies having something official. Or maybe you simply don't know about something until you see it on a shelf.

What are your options? Order for free and wait 6-10 weeks. Order on Amazon for $12.99 plus shipping and wait about a week. Drive to Best Buy and pay $20.

I don't see how that's predatory. The cost is about convenience, shelf space and distribution. And it's nice to know Ubuntu is competing with Windows someplace physical.
12. Let me see my salesforce ranked by closing rate or cold call rate or customer satisfaction.

13. Let me see my inbound call data by hour, sorted by number of rings before answer, or by percentage of calls unanswered.

14. Let me sort my customer service requests by customer value. (Including loyalty, purchases and referrals).

These 3 should all be a standard part of any good small business system already. The fact that Seth even brings them up makes me wonder...

- Is he using crappy business software?

- Do most people he encounters use crappy business software?

- Do most people (in general) use crappy business software?

In any case, these are just 3 tiny parts of the problem I'm addressing. The opportunity is enormous.
Honestly, I think if the colors were just better picked it wouldn't look so awful at first glance. It's designed for speed, but that doesn't mean you have to make it bright and oddly colored.
We're incorporating under the name Tiny Sauce, LLC.
I'm going to repost here what I did there, so sorry to anyone who reads both:

I’m sorry, but I’ve read his defense – and this analysis – and I still say FAIL . If speed’s the primary concern, why would you use the scrolling widget to enter the mileage? That’s going to be measurably slower and less accurate than a simple text field that pulls in the dialing/numeric keyboard.

My impression is that they’re operating entirely without user testing – their intentions are correct (make if fast, etc.), but they’re unwilling, unable, or too rushed to verify their decisions by watching people use various alternatives.
The reaction should be positive, if anything. Linux distros have been for sale on computer-store shelves for years; OpenOffice.org shows up sometimes, too. Installfests sometimes ask for a few bucks for the disks if you want to keep them.

I believe the GPL requires a "reasonable" price, though, corresponding to shipping/handling/media/convenience. So $50-$100 is justifiable, but $1000+ less so. A court challenge to someone hawking $5,000 Debian licenses to BigCo would probably still be tricky, though, since it's easy to claim the extra cost is for installation support, expertise, etc.

Judging by past FSF lawsuits, it seems to be easiest to tag a reseller for failing to include a GPL notice or instructions for getting the source code.
Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML
I think your claim that they're somehow using Ubuntu's free CD package is a bit of a stretch. It's a big claim to make without any backing evidence. Don't you think Ubuntu would take notice if Best Buy asked them for 5,000 free copies?

Best Buy has been selling Linux distributions for years - I bought a copy of Slackware in like 99 or 2000 because I didn't want to spend the time downloading it; as an added bonus, it came with a manual that I could let my girlfriend use if she wanted to toy around with it.
Yeah, I rewrote that comment a bunch of times trying to get a phrase that wasn't too long or too offensive. But yes, that's exactly what I was trying to say.
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True, but I feel there are better approached to include both.

Does anyone who has knowledge of the iPhone SDK know if you can make a regular window scroll?

That would allow the "Latest Trips" to be slightly below everything, so its a quick swipe to check.
What's wrong with 3?

IMO, indent is personal preference, and as long as you're 100% consistent, and stay away from the devil-spawn tab character, you're ok.
I can't believe that Windows for Warships didn't make the list.

(I wish I was kidding, but I'm not - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/26/windows_boxes_at_sea... - this would be bad for an American warship, but this project is British, an excellent decision to use offshore closed source technolgy!)

Mind you that isn't as bad as the fact that the new British carriers will use an ammunition handling system based on the baggage system in use at Terminal 5 :(
The Free Bird Database
Ettercap Tutorial and Demo