skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. You're right. You do need something.

Part of my point was, though, that nobody should need to do an objective study. :) Because it's pretty frickin obvious to anybody with a brain who works in the field, in my judgment. And it's not limited to our field. It's a human-wide phenomenon.
I actually had (slightly) worse issues with body oder while using soap and shampoo every day. I didn't expect any positive change going the no soap route, the whole experience has been surprising.

Anyway, worked for me. I'm also a fairly skinny guy with a low body fat percentage, not sure if that made any difference.
Some seriously impressive tech from Microsoft:

- 4 inches thick

- Each pixel on the Surface screen is a camera.

- Horizontally and vertically mountable.

- Able to detect text on a objects placed on the surface of the screen. They demoed it by placing a paper with text on the surface.

- Surface has the biggest piece of Gorilla Glass ever produced.
The latest developments being reported are new. Previously the study had been found to be erroneous, it is now been decided parts of the study are outright fraudulent.

There is a big difference between fraud and making mistakes. Mistakes in study methodology or in drawing conclusions are expected to happen in science, hence the peer review process. Fraud on the other hand usually ends a scientist's career.
Transparency at its finest.

Yet another bold move by Heroku, I guess they feel even stronger since their $212MM sale.
Using KissMetrics to improve your website
I think the point is that the elite benefit from the public services even if we do not use them directly. E.g. if we work in an office building we benefit from the services that allowed the worker vacuuming to be there, though we didn't necessarily take the bus there ourselves.
[edit] but this is not to say that anyone should be restricted unduly.
Ask HN: Low priced commodity hardware
I'm building a consumer routing type device and need some low priced hardware that can run linux. The hardware needs to be able to support 802.11g/n and have at least one ethernet port (three preferable).

I've built a prototype using the board from pcengines.ch (which is a great bit of kit), however to make this thing commercially viable, i need a board that comes in at about 1/2 the price, say around USD$50 or there abouts.

Does anyone have any ideas/experience in this area they can share?
I have to say I cried a little bit when I read this - it seems that Matz et al are trying to make the language unparseable.

(Of course, perhaps I'm more sensitive than most, having actually written an Ruby lexer - http://github.com/jasonl/eden - which made me deal with the dusty, hidden corners of the Ruby grammar.)
My first comment came out a bit harsh. I keep returning to Nambu, but here are some gripes:

1. Clicking on an @handle in a tweet sends me to twitter.com instead of doing something within the app.

2. I'd love to see retweet tracking functionality handled as it is on the new Twitter.

3. I'd like to see better handling of user profiles than just sending me over to twitter.com

Basically, I've just started using the new Twitter because Nambu kept sending me over there so often.
It's fairly terrifying what an accretion of these sorts of options did to Perl, and I say that as someone who does a lot of Perl5 coding and enjoys it.

It would be one thing to just have a new symbol that was a drop-in alternative to what works now. But in this case you have a _sometimes_ alternative, so you need to remember a new rule, if only to be able read other people's code. That cognitive cost outweighs any keystroke benefit IMHO.
Yea i dont have an immediate need. I think ill wait a little longer to see what happens
I was actually surprised that the Hashrocket/Ruby 1.9 syntax joke didn't come up.
Zynga buys Flock
Michael Jordan Shoes Cheap Air Jordan
Go Slices: usage and internals
mea culpa, I didn't read that blog post closely enough
Ask HN: What do you expect Hacker News to look like in 5 years?
Personally, I expect to see the the same orange banner on top and all the simplicity of the current design. Maybe a few functionality tweaks here and there, but the overall appearance will stay the same in my opinion.

To let you know, I'm looking for answers that describe the atmosphere and functionality of Hacker News in addition to the appearance.
Ask HN: How do we democratize bandwidth?
A recurring theme these days, especially in the US, surrounds the growing mediocrity of the malevolent oligopolies who provide bandwidth to businesses and end users.

Patton Oswalt give a talk last night, mentioned the internet, and explained that most people in the room have better filmmaking technology (on their cellphones!) than did Orson Welles when he made Citizen Kane. His point about democratization is true in so many creative fields, from filmmaking to software development to comedy writing. Individuals and small groups have unprecedented power to create great work, and the disruptive effects of this are being felt in so many industries.

As we watch the sagas of WikiLeaks, MetroPCS and AT&T's marketing-only 4G network, it's apparent that distribution and bandwidth are only as democratized as corporate interests will allow, which threatens all the advances we've enjoyed in these lowered barriers to entry.

So how do we disrupt that? What application of people and technology will let us side-step the massive capital investments and central control that have historically been requisites for high-bandwidth networks? Is there anything on the horizon? Is anyone working on neutering these telecom scumbags in a meaningful, sustainable way? Give me some hope, here.
FWIW I flew last week and encountered the same auction screen as the OP. It indicated that the maximum bid was $400. Coincidentally, I did have some flexibility in my schedule, so I went for it. Turned out the flight was not actually overbooked, so there was no chance of getting that voucher. I was kind of disappointed. :-/
Again, I think you are mistaken. This may be partly my fault due to the missed quote above, but I don't think you understand the way bumping works in the US. Perhaps this page will be clearer: http://airconsumer.dot.gov/publications/flyrights.htm#overbo...

The law definitely applies to domestic flights. It's actually international where it gets trickier.

Whether it's a good deal or not depends on your urgency in getting to your destination. I've probably successfully volunteered to be bumped about 6-8 times in my life, and have been satisfied with compensation offered, which usually is equivalent to a voucher for a free round-trip ticket. It has also included an overnight hotel voucher in couple of cases where it was necessary.

I've never been bumped involuntarily, likely because there is always a volunteer willing to take some offer the airline will make. The highest I've received (international with the next flight in the morning) was an $800 voucher, presumably because the alternative to the airline was $800 cash. But as always, your mileage may vary.
Also, "this class isn't interesting so I'm going to badly in it and screw up my GPA" is a pretty immature and foolish attitude.
TechCrunch Confirms Tweetie 2 Coming Tomorrow
Airtran provides a measure of competition in the Atlanta market, but I find that their fares are often near identical to Delta economy fares.
I see hardware design as mostly the same as software. There really isn't much difference to it. You can have flashes of genius and figure out how to implement a solution in minutes, just like in software.

And just like for production software, you have to test your code to death to make sure there isn't any bug. For instance, we usually booted Linux on CPUs to make sure nothing would go wrong (and things would usually go wrong around cycle 1,000,000,000! Debug that)
Given the current trends in migration from other communities, I wouldn't be surprised if Paul is pressured into adding a "tl;dr" link to the header. ;)
It looks great, but... Come on... Bring back single tasking...
And who will buy RockMelt? RockYou?
Vermont. It gets hot/humid in the summer here, but obviously this is not a hot climate.
People complain about Lisp's parenthesis all the time. I almost never found them bothersome and this comes from a Lisp newbie. My editor is vim though, not emacs.

The only occasion that parens have bothered me is when I have to read code printed on paper. Some code pieces are too beautiful to resist the temptation of taking a print out for a weekend reading, comment out bits with a pencil, scribble arrows all over it etc. Its then when I have to match tiny parens printed 2-up on a piece of paper that it gets frustrating, my eyes not being what they used to be (but I still print 2-up).

A thought just occurred to me: maybe add a pretty printing mode to a2ps that draws the parens in different sizes and gray scale values. May be some day.
On MongoDB: If it quacks like an RDBMS...
This is the result of a series of steps that each seemed somewhat reasonable — like a marketing version of path dependence (or maybe ratcheting). Clearwire called WiMax 4G because it's an incompatible, more advanced, and dramatically faster protocol than EV-DO or WCDMA. Then T-Mobile introduced HSPA+ which is technically an incremental evolution of 3G but is actually faster than WiMax; thinking that it's unfair for a faster network to have fewer Gs, they called it 4G. Now AT&T will be penalized if they call their HSPA+ 3G, so they also call it 4G.

Honestly, the traditional G naming scheme was too arbitrary and confused users.
I don't have an answer, but I agree with the idea. Tools are not the key to productivity.
You can't figure out why SixApart, a company whose primary business is blog hosting, might want to know if a potential sysadmin had kept a blog ?
1994? Srsly?
Tweetie 2.0 is the entire reason I purchased Tweetie 1.0 last year as part of a MacHeist bundle - they said we'd get 2.0 for free when it was released.

If they charge for 2.0, I hope they don't "conveniently" forget about that deal.

(And if they always intended 2.0 to be free, props for sucking $20 out of me.)
I think it's more thumbing their noses at Apple's propensity to lock down their devices. There's no challenge putting windows on an unlocked device, but putting apple's traditional competitor's os on a product that apple's best and brightest had supposedly locked down must carry some kind of thrill.
I love that example.

Another one: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

For many years hundreds of programmers worked on anti-SPAM systems that weren't as effective as the very simple method PG proposed.

If anyone else can think of more I'd love to know them.
It seemed, at least to me, like he was going to great pains to avoid talk of monetary compensation, which implies not paid.
I read quite a bit about measurable programmer productivity in the 90's because it was an interest of mine. Basicly the studies were worthless. Professional programmers were too expensive, so CS undergraduates were used. As you can imagine there are 10x differences in programmer experience among undergraduates. When my son was interviewing colleges a decade or so ago, we sat down and estimated that he had written about 40,000 lines of code in high school, mostly professionally and mostly hard stuff, like video codecs, mone was easy stuff like html or php. Some of you have done that. Some of his classmates had done some basic a summer or two before. Well there is at least 10x that he could easily maintain. 10 years after college there are still 10x programmers, but things are much moir even.

The bottom line? Studies using a group of undergraduates on a day-long project are worthless.

The other thing I have seen are efforts to measure professional programmers via time sheets, even had to do it myself, usually in the guise of getting us to produce more reliable estimates. Not more accurate estimates, but more reliable in the sense that Jack is always off by 4x while Jill is consistently off by 1.5x. These efforts usually died because programmers resisted the hassle.

Other measurements have been equally worthless. Measure by lines of code? You get lots of blank line and comments. I have even worked on projects that required 2 pages of comment for 5 lines of code.
Yep, array() is the icing on the cake. Why is the most common data structure in the language instantiated with a function?

I could probably rant on PHP syntax all day long, but it's too off topic here.
I get the impression that the tide has turned in the battle, and we should start seeing an improvement in vaccination rates over the next few years. Pity there will be a large lag as children who weren't immunized grow up and continue to get sick from these preventable diseases.
I can't disagree with you.

I mean that: I can't. It is logically impossible for me to disagree. My thesis is that there is no repeatable definition of a good institution. Your definition is just as good as any. Personally I like it.

I would simply point out that a lot of folks have written a lot of books and essays about what makes a good institution. We've yet to see something reproducible. We've seen a lot of things that sound and feel good, and I completely believe that your points are valid, but that and 5 bucks will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

I can line up a dozen other folks that will tell you that a good institution fosters creativity, or puts the individual above the group, or is one with a spiritual center, or is one in which open communication is everywhere, or any one of a thousand other things that also sound pretty good.

If the answer to this question involved pleasing the most people with your reasoning, there's no doubt in my mind that you would do very well. But it doesn't.
Originally the ITU ruled that neither WiMax or LTE were 4G in October: http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/4g-defined-wimax-and-lte...

Which meant neither Sprint's or Verizon's network were 4G, but that didn't stop them from advertising.

In December, the ITU changed their mind and now WiMax, LTE, and HSPA+ can be called 4G: http://www.intomobile.com/2010/12/18/itu-reverses-its-decisi...

At this point, I think 4G is just mostly a marketing phrase now.
Doubt it was intended to be free, but it probably will be free.

If I remember properly, Macheist was before Twitter acquired atebits. When atebits was acquired, they immediately madeTtweetie for iPhone free, because that is in their best interest.
I wash my hair with shampoo only when I haven't been able to rinse it regularly and it accumulates gunk.

My blond, 3-4 inch long hair is shiny and lays on my head just fine. When I wash it.. its about two days before it goes back to being the same. Mostly it gets frizzy, but my scalp will also dry out to some degree, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone had increase dandruff.. though there is probably a bit of hyperbole going on here.
Talked to allan the other day. This isn't happening. I don't think he even has any plans for Textmate 1.0 to appear in the store any time soon.
I'd like to also add: QA Engineers. If you're interested in testing browsers on desktop, mobile, and cloud services, this is the place for you. From black box, whitebox, automation tools, web development tools... you'll be touching cutting edge technologies and working with brilliant engineers in ensuring high quality to Firefox. Lastly, you will help guide our international community of testers in how to better test Mozilla products. Check the careers link for more information.
Customer-owned fiber takes back the last mile at least. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/07/customer-owned-fi...
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/homes_tails

Unfortunately, there's no way to convince most people that this benefits them.
Isn't this the feature that Steele and Stallman were working on, in Guy Steele's example of extreme pair programming.

http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/extreme-pair-programmi...
Comimix is live  http://bit.ly/comimix
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Check out video at www.comimix.com/comimix-ipad/

To get promo code drop email at contact@comimix.com :)
Poking around a bit, the British Medical Journal itself has a much more in-depth and interesting article on the web, which the CNN story is but a pale reflection of: http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5347.full
Let's throw in support for keyworded arguments while we're at it, too.
Barely related, but at what point does Zynga ask themselves why they need Facebook?
The Christmas tree surplus problem
Betting on an Energy Cornucopia?
>Interesting. Is there any particular reason why you went all mac?

Unix, works well, has some of the nicest apps out there is my guess.

(I split most of my work between my Mac and Linux)
I like the blogpost. Is 1000memories.com down? I got pointed to an "Application Error" page when I tried to access it.
Here's my set of them:
http://moultano.blogspot.com/2010/12/history-through-google-...

I got totally addicted to this for 24 hours and couldn't do anything else. Completely amazing. I believe history now!
Troll? No, simply an expression of incredulity. Every time I've seen stories like these the one thing they always have in common is they reek of bad science. Confirmation bias, no control, no double-blind setup, non-empirical testing procedures, you name it.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all I'm seeing here is one single piece of anecdotal evidence. If you want to convince me of the virtues of forgoing soap, then give me a peer reviewed paper in a major journal, not a blog about how your family and random strangers say that you don't smell terrible.

But hey, if anecdotal evidence is all we need today then let me add some of my own: I know two people who have admitted to trying this, and I really did like to be several feet away from both.
Crunchbase web crawler source and data
Tell HN: my first android app
built my first android app (from almost zero experience to some, in a day) and deployed it on the google market. It's a mobile take on about.me/threewords.me.

It's available on the market as "About Jose Moreira", but i don't have a droid phone to test it, anyone? ;)

Shots:

* http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3645517/device.png

* http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3645517/device_menu .png
I live in Georgia, which can be a 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day in the summer (high 30's Celsius) and below freezing (mostly at night) in the winter. I and my two sons no longer use soap or shampoo. I also don't use deodorant. I have made quite a lot of dietary and lifestyle changes to get well when doctors claim that isn't possible. Giving up soap/shampoo was a very late game change, after a whole lot of other stuff happened first.

My opinion: This isn't simple. The way you smell is due to a combination of chemical and bacterial/microbial influences and changing one of them can upset the balance, temporarily causing die-off, purging effects, etc. before some new balance is firmly established. For me, I first spent years getting myself healthier before it made sense to give up shampoo. Presumably, for those folks where this works, they don't have whatever chemical and/or microbial issue causes you to smell when you give it up. (My experience: The kind of stable temperature/climate you live in does a very poor job of killing off microbes. Drastic changes in temperature are hostile to microbes and make it harder for the same ones to be causing smelliness year round. Ridding your home of some microbe of that sort is quite challenging and you probably would not be willing to go to the lengths I have gone to in order to accomplish something like that.)

EDIT: I will add that I do put salt in my bath water. So it is not like I am using nothing to kill stuff.
I've been using 1.9 for a year now but I haven't come across any incompatible gems yet!
Google Wins Freeze on U.S. Contract With Microsoft
HN was launched in Feb 07. The complaints that it had jumped the shark began about a year later, when we got a sudden influx of new users after
Arrington wrote about us. To measure any possible decline I created an alternative version of the frontpage that only counted the votes of users who signed up in the first year:

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

As you can see, it's still not much different from the regular frontpage, which is encouraging.

The median comment is probably not as good as it was several years ago, nor as
civil, but things aren't dramatically worse,
partly because the sorting of comments (which I've tweaked a fair amount) means
the lame ones are less visible.

HN traffic roughly doubles each year. That growth rate shows no sign of decreasing. If it continued we'd have 32x the traffic in 5 years. We currently get a bit over 80k unique visitors on a typical weekday. 32x that is 2.6 million. It seems overoptimistic to expect the site could grow to that size and still be bearable to use. So probably either the growth rate is going to have to decrease, or HN will be destroyed. I'll do my best to make sure it's not the latter.
That looks like a pretty amazing phone. Dual Core Tegra 2 and 1gig of RAM is around twice the specs of my Galaxy S.
Kerie cable preparation
I use a todo list so I don't forget things. When I'm developing software, the ideas come faster than I can execute them, for one. But the list is only a vim buffer, so it would be hard to waste time micromanaging it like you can with more elaborate todo-list software.
The new Nike HTML5 site is pretty badass.
Have you seen http://ubnt.com/airrouter http://ubnt.com/routerstation http://ubnt.com/powerapn ? You can replace the firmware with your own.
Is this pronounced the same as Kegel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kegel_exercise
"The sad thing is even though the study has been thoroughly discredited, it continues to hang around and be cited by anti-vaccine activists."

Unlike HN commenters constantly promoting dangerous psychiatric drugs that are no more effective than placebos, extrinsic rewards for children who read/exercise, Bill Gates' KIPP-based school reforms, the conflation of homeopathic and naturopathic medicine, using GPA for hiring, etc.
My List of Daily Productivity / Work Apps. What's Missing?
There's a disconnect here. You're falsely associating "average marks" with "didn't apply yourself", which simply isn't true, particularly in our field (I'm assuming you're in software).

I wasn't blessed with an unusually powerful intellect. I knew guys in college who would just get the course material after a couple of hours. For the rest of us earning marks meant many dozens of hours pounding a book, and at that point you run across the very real limitation of having 24 hours in a day.

The vast majority of college students have to make a very real tradeoff - marks vs. practical experience. For me, I chose not to invest dozens more hours to eke out 10% more on the exam, and instead chose to put it into hacking on relevant projects that taught me new technologies.

My marks were certainly not poor, they were perhaps 1 std. deviation above average. Decent, not great. Could they have been higher? Sure, but I'm no ubermensch, it would've meant a large sacrifice in another area.

If that's your image of a student not applying himself, then guilty as charged. I for one don't regret it for one second - after all, I hacked out a lot of stuff in those 4 and a half years (paid my way through schools by not having summers and staggering internships between semesters instead), and had a number of offered before graduating thanks to it. I'd hate to imagine my position if I'd just stuck to acing the school work and never hacking anything on my own.

Again, this goes back to my original point: companies that weigh marks heavily in recruitment are making a lot of fundamentally unreliable assumptions and rejecting candidates (before interviews, even) on what is IMHO a weak correlation to on-the-job performance. With the exception of a small minority of extremely smart people, someone with top marks had to sacrifice something major to get there, and in my experience that "something" is often something that gravely impacts employability.