skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OCD also applies to coders - speaking from experience here. You haven't seen truly refactored code until you've seen somebody with OCD try to infinitely refine it :)
Cnet.com was one of the first tech sites I visited on a regular basis for news. Eventually I fluttered over to Slashdot, then Digg, then Y!Hack and use Techmeme to find out what's going on.

I wish 'em luck, but they may need more than a facelift to get me back to their site in a regular way.
Okay I guess we'll have to delve into a GPS review:

TomTom made an announcement with Vodafone back in 06. Nothing's come out of that. You still need a traffic receiver attached to your unit to get data over the air or you need to plug the unit in to your computer with the Internet to share your map corrections. Dash does this in real time over the air.

As for 10 dollars a month: well no one pointed a gun at your head. I find the product more valuable than 10 bucks a month and I'm willing to pay. My yearly Garmin map updates would have been 80 bucks or so anyways without the added benefits.
Even more concerning to me is how frequently these "not hacker news" comments are added to posts that are off the beaten track (i.e. not about code, startups, and such) but which I find genuinely interesting. The last thing I'd want for this site is diminished diversity. I don't like the spam or bait posts either, but I'm glad you haven't cracked down on them in a way that triggers this other, imho more significant risk.

Edit: while I'm at it, the "not hacker news" noise belongs to a more general class that I've been training myself to tune out, which is the "meta hacker news" category. A bad day here is one in which there's more discussion of the site itself than anything else. And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm doing it right now. :) But I've been resisting it successfully for weeks...
Those who know won't tell. And those who tell don't know.
I took an Asperger's test online and scored just below the threshold for the syndrome. I wonder how many other coders are in the same category.

I just found the wired test and also scored just below the threshold. I had no idea.

OTOH, I dressed as Rainman at last year's 80's themed Haloween party. There were 3 Devo groups and 6 Palmer girls, but I was the only Rainman. I didn't even have to act. I should have known something was up.

Kmart sucks.

Definitely.
It also has the beneficial effect of ending stupid debates. Joel's BoS forum had other limitations (like lack of quoting and threading) that they kept because it improved the level of discourse.
The Original Basecamp Preview Post
Online Asperger's test: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

Pressing "Calculate Score" though will show you the source code of the Perl script instead of calculating your results - however the code is easy to follow :)

My score: 24.
We should all at least endeavour to meet each other once in a while where possible e.g. perhaps posting somewhere here the next major tech conference/event/other we are going to.
Why & How to Build Social Capital Online - Tara Hunt Interview
10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus at Work
Book: The Whuffie Factor
Does Creative Commons Work? Check Out the New Case Studies Database
To play devil's advocate, why does the school system have to deal with your son? A teacher makes a very low salary and can barely handle an overloaded classroom the way it is. Handling a child with behavior issues is the last thing they need.

Now considering that my son has "sensory issues" and my nephew is autistic, I'm in a position to make that argument.

I have a problem with dumping my child on the state and saying "here you go, deal with him." I understand your frustration but to assign blame to the school is a bit over the top.

Get your family doctor to make a referral to a children's behavioral specialist (a medical doctor trained in the field). Find out if there really is a problem.

You may also benefit from some counseling. My wife works with children (early head start) and has had several with Asperger's and Autism disorders. The parent go through a grieving process and can be very hostile to suggestions that their child has a problem.

It's been very difficult for us but with therapy (OT and PT) things have improved greatly. It's too bad my nephew's parents waited so long to get him help. He's finally speaking at age 4.
Did you not get many responses from your YouNoodle post?
In the meantime, they can make it useful in other ways, perhaps getting real-time traffic feeds from servers, as it hinted it did, and as that feature attracts a user base, they can make it even more attractive by adding features that utilize this network-effect.
Well I'm located in the Bay Area, but you can get 2 GB of Crucial ram for $20 at Frys Electronics.
The Lego Secret Vault: Lego Secret Vault Contains All Sets In History
Awesome thread. Compare this to your own business models folks, there is gold in understanding how Wow because such a powerhouse. You may not be able to apply all the principals, but just a few can make a world of difference in your start up.

We often talk about community on our sites. You ain't seen real community until seen Wow after you've played any serious amount of time. I have many real-life friends that I've met in real-life through playing the game.
A Look Inside Wikipedia's Infrastructure
I have it but I still think it is an anti-future, please, remove it
I really don't see what's the big deal. Lots of programs do lots of things without using lots of space..
One fascinating thing about the psych field is that these diagnoses come in fads. It seems like autism/asperger is supplanting attention-deficit as the trendy thing. In the 80s/90s there was a wave of detecting sexual abuse everywhere. The fad thing goes way back, too: in Freud's early days there were huge numbers of hysterics, many of whom were manifesting pretty dramatic symptoms. Yet one never hears about that any more. Where did they all go?

Anyway, good for you, and lucky for your son, that you're not putting up with it in his case. I bet they couldn't wait to medicate him.
Anyone that uses HN Blacklist (Toolkit) GM script, please upgrade!
The way the script was written, using the splitview feature will inadvertantly click the new 'flag' link instead of loading the comments page. (Since the comments link is no longer the lastChild of it's containing td element.)

This is now fixed, so please upgrade to avoid inadvertent flagging!

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

(Sorry for the bug, but it's always a risk with GM scripts that the target site changes its structure.)
Please remove the flag feature
Please remove the flag feature
dollars-to-donuts its an Ed (Edward) Ruscha. I've got a book filled with his word-phrase images.
Two great links for you:
http://www.psychochild.org/?p=409
leveraging psychology for MMORPGs
and
http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20080408/
game mechanics in social sofware
I mentioned the voting issue earlier:

"I considered having this as a feature but didn't for two reasons. Since this is geared towards the investment community, I felt most serious investors don't care about community and what others think, and last, what's popular to some may not even be relevant to others in this industry."

The site is built on Drupal and jQuery.
Even if the major labels were only useful outside of marketing, that would make them a pretty big deal. The consumption of pop music hinges completely on how well your image and sound is sold to the general public. It's hard not to like "Umbrella" when it plays 10 times a day on top 40 radio. When Madonna's album is at eye level right when you walk into BestBuy, you can bet it's going to sell a lot more copies than similar (better?) ones that are just sitting alphabetized under "Pop / Rock."

If your aim as a musician is to earn enough money to make your full-time effort worthwhile, distributing music through MySpace alone might get you enough cash to survive. If you're shooting for worldwide fame or the type of money that lets you live like a rock star, you pretty much can't do without the connections and money the majors provide.

edit:
The point of all this being, no matter how cheap it gets to produce and distribute music, you'll never beat the majors (in pop music) if there's not a cultural shift away from consuming the music served out to the public by expensive marketing campaigns.
Twitter announces new funding round
Awesomesauce. Though I agree the world should move away from windows in the browser, frameworks like this are great too. The tabs and so on are slick.

Edit: hey, it works in IE! I guess this is Canvas.IE? Is the author on news.yc?
This chart is interesting. http://www.technologyreview.com/files/17765/chartusads_x600....

Online advertising is growing massively. Social network advertising is growing dismally. Why so many people are still kicking the dead donkey?
Hello to you there @ Bear Stearns. I'm a Bloomberg core infrastructure engineer, and I can second that. I can type in a symbol and type in a functional mnemonic, hit enter and see a news aggregate pertaining to a certain security, along with just about everything else you want to know about the security and/or the company underlying it. And of course Bloomberg messaging is a premier form of OTC trading. I understand this is most likely targeting the armchair investor (aka clueless speculator) although they should probably go to Vegas instead if they think they're going to make consistent returns picking stocks with their meager information.
This reminds me of the CineFX 100th anniversary issue. It was organized as a series of interviews with visual effects professionals, and the running theme basically came down to, "Do it right in the camera, don't fix it in post."

It's actually also appropriate here, because one of the reasons that the visual effects guys pointed out is that doing it right up front costs a LOT less than "fixing it in post" and takes a lot less time.
I think it's mostly escapism. Everyone here has a lot of reasons why people are choosing this form of escapism over another like television or some other MMORPG, and a lot of them are good ones, but in the end it just comes down to the game being engaging enough that it makes you forget about all of the troubles in your life for a few hours while you play it.

I would argue that most people who engage in it (or any other form of escapism) for a large number of hours are depressed.
Revenge Of The Angel Investor
What happened to AI depends on who you ask. If it's Peter Norvig during his recent startup school talk <http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/peter-norvig-at-start... > he pointed out advances in image recognition, language translation and driverless cars as examples that AI research is already succeeding. "Now if you only define success as 'Can we duplicate a human?' - well, maybe that's a harder goal. On the other hand, I've done that, too - I have two kids, and they're pretty smart."

If you ask Kevin Warwick, a.k.a. Captain Cyborg, who hosts this year's Loebner Prize Contest at Reading University, a machine might pass the Turing test a little more than four months from now: "I believe machines are getting extremely close - it would be tremendously exciting if such a world first occurred in the UK, in Reading University in 2008. This is a real possibility." Yes, he really said that <http://www.reading.ac.uk/research/Highlights-News/featuresne... >.

Then there are the Artificial General Intelligence guys, like Ben Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Pei Wang. Roughly, they claim we're getting there, agree that everybody else is doing it wrong, but can't agree on which of them is doing it right. But wait, even Doug Lenat is still in the game; go watch his Google presentation <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7704388615049492068... >.

And then there are those who think that AI is a medium ("Expressive AI"), and that the most interesting applications are in videogames like "Spore" and interactive dramas like "Facade". That's what interests me most, personally. Well, I keep track on all the other stuff, too, but I see that also from the AI-as-medium angle, not from a the-singularity-is-coming angle.

Oh yea, and then the article quotes a "futurist" called Daniel Burros: "The first application of successful AI was in the financial services industry for loan qualifications. Loan qualification went from one to two weeks down to minutes." A qualification that struck me as kinda subprime, I must say.
Thanks!

Can you do type=comment or something like that?
Am I the only one who thinks that it's bad?
"Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model".

Yet to be defined.

Hopefully not direct text message ads!
I'm curious why the iPhone couldn't just take on these features?
Perhaps I misunderstand you, but isn't the opposite true?

Presumably you would target PHP with the compiler for the same reason many people target C: it's a fairly universal language, supported on many platforms. A Ruby => PHP compiler would be very interesting because it would allow you to write Ruby code (fun!) on any system that runs PHP (many!). A PHP => Ruby compiler would be of questionable use because it would allow you to write PHP code (yuck!) on any system that runs Ruby (not so many!).
Fair enough @ TomTom

Sure, I expect if you drive a lot, in traffic hotspots, with a lot of other Dash users, it's worth it.
While we are trying to draw parallels, I've got one:

You can eat too much of your own dog food.

Lucas loves his ILM, and rightfully so, but that doesn't necessitate CGI fire on the torches in the new Indy movie. Just because you have a lot of cool software and talented people doesn't mean you NEED to use them.
Personally, I think the discussion on the competitive advantage of the IMAX film format is a significant parallel (only one lab to process the film, offers huge visual depth, but at significant cost, company had some financial trouble, etc. etc.). Also, of course, the glaringly obvious parallel: Nolan's workspace is the "Garage".
Darcs 2.0.1 AND 2.0.2 released
We're an energy efficiency software startup called Positive Energy, and we're expanding rapidly, looking for software engineers (Java, web, database) to grow our engineering team. We're based in Rosslyn, across the river from Georgetown. Our products are 100% software and are designed to help utilities inform their customers and drive down energy usage. You can read about what we do, our team and our jobs at www.positiveenergyusa.com.
Isn't that premature?

And if some really use it inappropriately then they could just lose their right to flag. No need to bother the vast majority who will use it when it's deserved.
Dupes?
Having both a downvote and "flag" on comments seems a bit too much. Nobody seems to spam the comments, and trolls get downvoted.
I believe it is laced with crack.
I fully agree with you. We took care of the handwriting on our own. This stuff came to a head in 1st grade; he's going into 4th and doing great. He is, among other things, more social than I was when I was his age.

What I object to is the school's attempt to tag my son's record with a totally unscientific assessment of "autism" in order to make their system work better with my son.

Is there real autism out there? Of course there is. But there is also a lot of bullshit autism.
Whether it's premature or not, I'm just putting the idea out there. The question is, what does that take away? If the item is truly flagworthy, then it shouldn't be any problem filling in a box.

The added benefit is that you have much less accidental flagging.
> will show you the source code of the Perl script instead of calculating your results

B-b-but Wired gets the web. 1998's web, judging by the tech they use.
It's 21 to down vote. I recently got that ability.
cool, I can't believe I haven't had occasion to use them yet.

thank you
Book name ?
The reasons are manifold.

1. They took every lesson from every MMORPG before them, and put it into WoW. This means things like PvP flags, and not having death exact a heavy toll. This was not obvious to WoW's predecessors. Generally, Blizzard does not enter a market first, they wait, let others innovate, and then combine features into a heavily polished product crafted around an easily understood theme.

2. They reward human psychological tendencies to generate habits. This is done through staging a series of rewarding goals. The repetitive parts are not so repetitive that you lose sight of the goal. If the user can hold the goal in their mind and find achieving it satisfying, then a player will return multiple times to what is essentially the same task.

3. They capitalize off of the desire for novelty. Blizzard did a great job of establishing variance in terrain, music, audio, objectives, and creatures. Little touches like non-enemy animals roaming the land broke up the environment into a place that felt diverse enough to be real. Providing places with enough characteristics to endow unique identity made the place even more memorable. A heavily carpeted room, a place that emanated foreboding, or a bizarrely twisted tree. Places like that were memorable and this prevented them from entering into the tedium.

4. They struck the perfect balance between the feeling of work and play by fostering the social component well. Try playing WoW by yourself and with others. These will be very different experiences. One will eventually be a boring game, and the other will incorporate the pleasant grooming of conversation so well, you'll discover you're talking more than playing the game.
can anyone tell if it works on ie6?
Adobe creative suite users
One of our clients is trying to connect with adobe creative suite users for paid consultations. It's an easy way to make some money and help a YC reject :) Our client is a research firm - we'll pass your application to them and if they think you're a fit they'll schedule a screening call with you and engage you directly. And sorry if this is spammy...flag away if you think it is

http://tinyurl.com/5bh63z
"Lawyers" is listed in the same column as the three mental disorders. Was that intentional?
Just above the paper he's reading I think - System Progamming by John Donovon.
This secret was already exposed twice: http://searchyc.com/submissions/dark+secret
bezos. dang.
StartupWarrior shows the locations of computer technology companies across the globe
I would use this. It'd be cool if the blog posts are voteable so that the really interesting ones can bubble up to the front page as actual news.yc entries.
The article would suggest that most of the bands that "make it big" don't make a lot of money, unless they're like Madonna and have stayed popular past the initial sodomizing. So, making a living off of Myspace would be better for many bands than selling 500,000 albums one year.
Have you thought about just putting a floor on downvoting?

It seems anything that truly merits a -10 is firmly in 'getting killed by an editor' territory, with possible account deletion, and, if there were a floor, anything that doesn't deserve a -10 would not get modded into oblivion for no reason.

Maybe you don't want to change the modding system that much, but I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on the idea?
Yoono pulls in $4M to shoot down Flock, misses the mark
It would be interesting if tnkgrl would measure the current on the power lines during a burn. That device is spec'd at about twice the USB power limit. (5.25w v. 2.5w).

So it may work for you, but it also may not depending on your USB host hardware and how serious it is about protecting itself from overcurrent loads.

Wandering further from topic, I noticed the new USB micro combined A/B connectors have higher current limits. Perhaps the standards group is considering a USB "higher power" variant. With the increasing use of USB as battery charger it could help.
Part of my argument, which I didn't explicitly state, is that most artists would rather their work be widely appreciated than it make a lot of money (any money?).
Twitter Announces Their Funding, Calls Itself A Communication Utility
The iPhone can be wildly successful and still be less than 1% of the browser market - a market that includes every desktop and laptop computer as well as every other smart phone.
Interestingly, Bezos Expeditions is listed amongst the investors.
Should I really trust a framework that forces me to use <br /> tags to seperates form fields from each other? Maybe this is a good starting point for people looking for getting more experiences with CSS and its culprits but probably no solution for productive environments. (And: tables are nice if you dont care for Googlebot, screen readers and many colleages working on the same code).
It works in IE6.
There are people claiming the drive only draws 500mA based on the fact that it shows up when plugged into mortal computers and claims 500mA. I think this is poor reasoning. There is no way for it to legally ask for more than 500mA in the USB protocol, so it asks for all it can and then uses some secondary mechanism to decide if it can really run.
"Blizzard-level of quality is hard to attain; they perfect every little detail."

This isn't literally true, but the point you're getting at is. They take the time to do things well. This is seen by how often they delay releasing games, patches, etc. Very few businesses have the balls to say, it's not ready and we're pushing back our deadlines.
Congrats to Twitter!
Points that come to mind:

- The leveling curve is just about right. At the beginning you gain levels very quickly, and with them new and exciting abilities. You always feel like you're making progress, be it with better spells, better gear, getting to adventure in new zones, etc.

- It's very casual-friendly. When you're logged out you earn "rest XP" which, upon logging back in, lets you level faster, so you don't have to play in large chunks of time to make progress. It's also pretty easy to level all the way up to 70 (max level) playing by yourself.

- There's a surprising amount of humor (pop culture references, etc.) which is a nice bonus.

- There are lots of things to do even at max level - this wasn't as true in the past but you can do daily quests, play in one of the four PvP battlegrounds, join an arena team, do raids, etc.
I think that it comes down to the same reason Civ was such a popular franchise. Whenever you finish one thing, there's another thing to do. Oh, just a few more points until I level... oh, I can finish this dungeon and get a new sword. There's also the social aspects of that - you do a dungeon with some friends, get involved in their dungeons later so it has a social motivation for returning as well. I think you also get emotionally attached to your character, and don't want to see him deleted by canceling your account.
No, but you're wasting screen space with your content-free post. Why is flagging bad?
This does seem a little unfair, but I'm not sure what the alternative is, since it does cost resources to check if the queue is empty.
It seems best to keep voting as a permanent operation. That will require people to think a little harder about whether a story or comment is truly worth an upvote.
It seems like there could be some performance benefits in pre-compiling or "pre-parsing" PHP. For instance, the compiler could copy specific functions or classes from an include file and save them right into the script where they're actually used -- therefore eliminating the performance hit of managing include files at runtime.

Now, as to whether there's a benefit to learning an entirely new language in order to do this, I'm not so sure. Why not extend (and simplify) PHP while still using PHP syntax and grammar, the way jQuery does for JavaScript?
It's easy to make money if you're willing to set a price. The trouble for web-based distractions is that they're afraid the price will be too high and kill their traffic.

Weewar.com is a solid game, but it's still just a distraction. The way they're making money is by providing a "pro" version where you get access to more distractions: http://weewar.com/upgrade
SearchYC.com provides a feed of each user's comments: http://searchyc.com/user/kirubakaran?only=comments&sort=...