skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, most single-window apps on OS X already quit when the window is closed. This is typically the desired behavior, especially for those less computer-savvy.
I've switched over to CoffeeScript for all projects where I get to choose. It's an all around better language than js if you tend towards the functional side.

Iteration/comprehensions work like they should[1], destructuring simplifies extraction, there's a prototype binding construct in the language, less line noise, and everything is an expression. I also happen to like indent-significant languages and think it's a great DSL language.

I could certainly produce the same code writing in JS, but what would the advantage be? I'm already doing a build step for combo/minification and if not, a --watch compile gives roughly the same workflow as raw JS. I have to search for a snippet of text rather than going to a line number when I'm debugging, but I think the coding gains/cleanliness is worth the slightly increased debugging effort.

[1] With one gripe, `y = x + 1 for x in 0...10` got changed in August to match up with `z = x if x % 2` and friends (it was special cased) so y is now 10 instead of the array 1..10 and you have to wrap the comprehension in parens.
That organization had much to do with starting the fraud in the first place.
Maybe we should just do a HN Poll. Note: I'm also betting on the fact that I'll have an extra $1000 by 2031. :)
And it appears Lion is going to bring some help to devs on doing just that (saving/restoring state).
Great ideas. We're also considering "one does just deploy into Gondor" but not enough people might get the reference :-)
Wether the rocket scientist likes it or not, money is a necessary evil. It sounds very noble to go on and on about how you're not interested in the 'money', but when you're sabotaging aspects of your life that require money it's not nobility that takes the front seat, it's stupidity.

It's not about getting rich and famous. It's about being able to provide for your family. It's about being able to maintain a lifestyle you're comfortable with through the good times and through the shit ones. It's about being able to pay for medical treatment for you and your loved ones when it's needed. It's not about innovating for the sake of making money, it's about making money as a byproduct of innovating.

As you, I have great respect for people that perform great work for the sake of great work (regardless of the money), but I'm deeply insulted by someone not taking a slice of the pie they baked themselves when their stomach is churning for food.

In this example, the rocket scientist may be a brilliant man, but he's also naive and stupid. He wants a family, but is put off because of the extra financial pressure it might place on his shoulders. This is like going backwards when the world is giving you a gift to move forward. This is also being irresponsible. You don't want the million dollars and the fancy cars? Fine, keep 500k for your family, get married, have children and put them in decent schools, pay for your mothers comfort on her last years, and give the other 500k to a charity instead of letting it pad someone else's pockets which are already filled with great amounts of cash.

If you have enough money to live the life you want, by all means do great work for the sake of great work and give it away for no retribution. But if you do need the money to fulfill your goals, it's an insult to all the poor people in the world to not make some money out of achievements that allow you to do so.
Show me an Intel device that compares with a 2W ARM cpu.
It's easy to know why this happened: Andreessen was an early investor in Qik, and now a huge investor in Skype.
"Mixed content documents, and more rope than you know what to do with. That's Nemo."

Hilarious. And probably true.
I wouldn't say so, no. The link title should clearly be changed to something less sensationalist.
well, it is available to our development clients, and soon some select private beta testers
Ask HN: Starbucks launched a new logo. What's your take on it??
Do you prefer the old or the new logo: http://verifyapp.com/p/4872 Results of the test should be published soon.
When I saw the iPad launched I was very concerned we are moving towards a market of consumer-only devices; devices which you can't use creatively to make content, program applications, etc.. Things like programming will be considered a "specialist" activity and new generations of nerds will have nothing to cut their teeth on because the only PCs are development workstations in corporate offices. Consumer computing will turn into pressing buttons and seeing magic happen, with no ability for curious people to figure out what's going on behind the scenes or modify it. A good litmus test is : can you use applications on the device to make entirely new applications for that device? You can do this on a Ti-86 calculator, but not on an iPad (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I'm not entirely convinced things will pan out like this, but the thought still occurred to me.
Here is a conspiracy theory for you guys.

1. How does Google make money? Search Ads.

2. How do people click on search ads? Bad real search results.
Ask HN: What are average conversion rates?
I have a couple of ideas, (OK, more than a couple) for projects to work on. Some are physical products, some are web apps, there's even a game. I need to pick one, and the logical way to do it would be, pick the one that pencils out as highest annual profits. Obviously any amount of number crunching you do up front is wrong, but you need to start somewhere.

I personally believe, after having devoted a year of my life to a site that almost nobody ever came to, that any plan that involves "getting bloggers to blog about it", "making it go viral", or "just build it, and they will come", is not a plan that I want to be a part of. Therefore, I am evaluating my ideas based on one metric. How much does it cost to get the traffic and is that number, given some conversion rate and lifetime customer value, less than what that traffic will make for me.

Yes, I know that all of these numbers are crap, but again, you have to start somewhere.

Google has a great tool to tell you how much traffic you might get, at a given maximum bid, so I'm using that to tell me my cost of traffic.

My initial attempts to evaluate my ideas assumed various cost of goods and sales prices for the physical products. For the web apps, I assume a lifetime customer value of one year of subscription, conservatively assuming they'll churn out after that time.

So, it all comes down to what I think I can sell for, and of course, conversion rate.

My question is, please help me get a feel for what a reasonable conversion rate would be. After googling, I see things like physical products have much, much higher conversion rates, sometimes approaching 8%. These numbers drastically push me towards the physical products, which were getting their butt kicked when I was assuming 0.5% or 1% conversion. However, they seem too good to be true, and that data is over 5 years old.

Does anybody have any good data or even anecdotes on conversion rates for various classes of products, physical, web app, or game?
Why Intel ? Some years ago AMD was ahead of them in terms of x86 cpus...even more years ago there were companies like Cyrix or Via all building x86 chips that ran windows very well.
Vaccines are generally not very profitable, to the point where the various industrialized nations are having to subsidize production to keep supply up.

Healthy skepticism is certainly good and reasonable, but what we're seeing is unhealthy skepticism. The science is in and overwhelming, but antivaxxers consistently latch on to debunked, unreliable, or outright loony evidence to support the increasingly discredited claims.
Razer. Don't make fun of things you don't know about. High quality mice are important. What would you buy instead? I looked at logitech mice of high enough DPI to use on my 27" iMac without any acceleration and I was not impressed. Razer makes nice stuff.
I've read The Sparrow countless times, I really love it.

As for the sequel, no, it's not as good. Obviously that was to be expected. If you loved The Sparrow, you might still want to read on about Emilio (and one of the others...), but it'll be kind of rough and poignant. I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it, but I'm happy to have read it, and I've been thinking about reading it again (only read it once so far, a few years ago).
Motorola uncloaks 10.1-inch dual-core Xoom "fondleslab"
Latent Dirichlet Allocation in Ruby
It is case-sensitive, try the following instead:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Google%2CMicrosof...
I don't drink SBUX, but I do like the new logo. Its simple and doesn't typecast them into being a coffee burner--err--roaster, exclusively.
UPDATE: day 3 here's their response:

Response (Amy M.) - 01/06/2011 11:07 AM
Thank you for contacting Customer Care.

The site is coded in Ajax and encripts itself to provide security.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.

Regards,

Customer Care
Any sufficiently intelligent and reasonable person could decide for themselves if gravity exists, It's not like our understanding of physics emerged fully-formed from the head of Zeus.

Any sufficiently intelligent and reasonable person wouldn't be questioning the established medical fact that vaccines provide an overwhelming net benefit. If they are, they almost certainly are not qualified to make an educated decision about it.

It's fine and dandy to play expert without a formal education in almost every situation, but in this case the lives of people, _and not just your own children_ is in play.
Arguably, HN and Reddit's minimal design are part of their success/charm. They have a minimalist style that doesn't get in the way of posting, and doesn't needlessly change.
Commercial PC game developers constantly run into the ~1.7GB address space available to user apps. You can forget memory-mapping any asset files. Windows can be booted with support for 3GB/process (same as the default on most Linux distros) but that's useless for mass market stuff. Even just running a 64-bit OS gives 32-bit user processes 4GB address space to play with.
So what begins?
I've been contributing to another HAML derivitive for python called HamlPy (https://github.com/jessemiller/HamlPy). It compiles down to Django templates, which made it very easy for me to convert my existing project. It's under pretty active development right now.
Reminds me of Windows 3.x's Hot Dog Stand theme.
Joe Ades wore custom thousand dollar suits and lived in park avenue while selling potato peelers on the street.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ia7TF2yVQU

I reckon I'd hate to sell water bottles in the beach to make a living, but don't knock it till you've tried it. You might be surprised at how much money you can make doing the simplest of things. I bet that if you made the money Joe Ades made while selling potato peelers, you would easily support your lifestyle and family.
On one hand, it makes me happy to see that evolution away from the x86 ISA is possible. On the other hand, it saddens me a bit it's Microsoft driving this change - we may have better, more modern processors under the same old OS monopoly we face today.
Introduction to RSpec presentation
Google does provide this service: it's called Google Custom Search. You can prioritize or blacklist sites and it's pretty easy to add it to your browser searchbar. I don't always use it, but I'll switch to it when I encounter a spammy topic, usually dev-related searches.

http://radleymarx.com/blog/better-search-results/
If you think that the "neat icons" are why people think the OS X interface is good, then you have a serious case of programmer tunnel vision.
> We can build new software to do anything we want ...

I'm being really pedantic here, but you actually can't. There are actually uncountably which are impossible to solve with an algorithm. There's a (by necessity) incomplete list of examples at: [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_undecidable_problems

[Edited for clarity.]
My grandma thanks you!
Interesting. Depends on search history? That might explain why it's so hard to fathom from this end.

As far as the login, I'm in a bit of a quandary. For the mis-typings, at some point on the page I tell them they have mistyped their search, the correct way to type it, and provide a link to where they really wanted to go. I feel like this is how I would want to be treated if I made the same mistake.

As I see those links being clicked, the idea is to move them higher or lower on the page depending on their use. This should get the user to where they want to go faster. But -- I also think it's important to correct the user's spelling. I don't want them coming back because they keep making simple mistakes. And I'm not happy with a page beginning with "Hey bub! You can't spell!" so there's probably an upper limit to how high I would put the "I really wanted Facebook you moron!" links. Maybe about halfway from the top?
We Just Reached 50+ User Mark Today http://fameoflight.com/Mathalon/?page=ranklist.php
Having used LinkedIn ads I've found it quite painful. The whole UX experience of advertising is a mess, poor analytics, lack of email notification, etc. and you're very restricted by the predefined list of occupations and industries. They completely fail to understand the value of the long tail.

Facebook is miles ahead of Linkedin when it comes to their self-serve advertising platform.
Ask HN: Startup investment opportunities for small-scale investors?
Hi guys. Like most HN users, I've been following the development of computer/web technology over the last five years, and it seems pretty obvious that this is an area that will keep growing and have greater economic impact.

In a regular economic environment, we would want to capitalize on this by buying shares in companies that have newly had an IPO. However, with the American IPO market being what it is today, the opportunities for small-scale investors (say, for investments around 20000-60000 dollars) are very limited. I guess you could try your hand at angel investing, but it requires physical proximity to a lot of technology startupts. Not all of us live in California. With this investment form, it is also the question of putting all your eggs in one basket, also avoiding the problem of dilution/prefered shares in later investment rounds.

What would be ideal for investors like me would be some sort of angel fund that accepted money from the outside, or maybe a secondary market for trading pre-IPO shares of newly started computer companies. Does anyone here know if there are any options that remotely resemble these things? It's a bit unfortunate that only the really big investors get to join the fun.
This data is from 2005, so I find it suspect
http://www.conversionchronicles.com/What_is_an_average_conve... I see these exact numbers quoted a lot, so I think they're just regurgitating from here.
2011 — The year Python takes over GIS
Very interesting that the Andreessen and Horowitz are on both boards. Typical incestuous nature of the tech/startup world I guess. Does that make people question the value of the deal for Skype? Or possibly is the original thought in investing in Qik that it could be acquired by Skype? Seems like sitting on these two boards could have been a huge conflict of interest.
Mircosoft's Surface 2.0 Now Uses Pixels That "Can See"
AWS Premium Support: Lower Prices, New Plans, Faster Response
Congrats, you were quoted in an article

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/04/weird_php_dos_vuln/
Crippling of the Mac for power users.
Never thought I'd hear anyone say that :)
One difference is this: StackExchange sites tend to focus on questions that have one objective, correct answer. StackOverflow, ServerFault, the math site, etc., all put the emphasis on having a single canonical resource for people asking questions about whatever topic. (There are exceptions to this, like programming.stackexchange.com, which is basically the "subjective questions" version of StackOverflow.)
OTOH, how can you tell if it is single-window or not?

iTunes is not, closing it leaves it running. iPhoto is, closing it shuts it down. Both look pretty much the same.
Disgusting. Just another stimulus coruptis jobs program and further take over of the internet. The private sector can handle it's own cyber security better faster and cheaper than the government ever could. Where do people get the idea that communism (government) can do anything better than capitalism? Call your congressman and senator and tell him or her to stop all the wars. That will do more for our security than a thousand government cyber centers. Also ask him to cut the federal government by 2/3, that will fix the economy more than all the stimuli and bailouts combined.
Seriously, the area around Yale is terrible.
E-Book Checkouts From Libraries Up 200% Last Year
That is what I mean. All products answer a question. Unsuccessful ones answer the wrong question. The question may make intellectual sense, it may be tempting - it's just wrong. So you end up with a product without a market. :)
does it work when the number is entered without scientific notation?
That's definitely more than a "text about wheat". I encourage you to read some of it. You'll find answers to your questions about legumes and nuts as well (anti-nutrient density is higher in these types of foods over the rest of vegetables).
Interesting point! Yes I do but you are not comparing like with like. It is generally unacceptable to make comments (accurate or otherwise) about other people's private sexual acts. Let's imagine we are at a local community meeting. Black is (currently) a polite word I can use for a dark-skinned person - should skin color actually be significant in a discussion. What would you suggest is the polite word to use during the meeting, in describing someone who enjoys oral sex?

My point about censorshop is that I don't think we should pander to the kind of person who thinks that uttering a word describing someone's skin color does indeed make some kind of substantive and abusive point - except to people of his own level. You may be right in that the word nigger will never lose its abusive power for some people. There are other unanswered points to make but I'd better leave it there.

Seems to me that censorship intensifies the power of the n word for these kind of people.
Real-time Snowball Fights on a Canvas in Node.js (see comment)
Indeed, they don't go as far as some of the other ones, but it's still a language that compiles down to JS. It's nice that it's a strict superset of JS (iirc anyway) but that alone doesn't mean that it's impossible to produce slow or bloated JS.

Of course any language that does a lot more than CS is going to be slower, e.g. Objective-J's object system providing method-missing functionality and a whack of other features not found natively in JS.
It might take less than 5 years. Both Motorola and Lenovo introduced an Android phone with a "laptop dock". Google for the "motorola atrix dock". It'll be a little while before it's useful, but it doesn't look like it'll take 5 years.
This is a great idea, when I was in the US under a F1 visa I didnt know how to get in contact with startups. I tried through recruiter, indeed it resulted into an epic fail.

Now I still looking but from EU makes thing even more difficult.
Mario Gonzalez wrote in with a game his team have built using Node and WebSockets: Ogilvy & Mather Holiday Snowball Fight. It’s a multiplayer game that uses a lot of interesting libraries, like CAAT and BiSON. The developers even say they based the multiplayer design on Valve’s Source Multiplayer Networking papers.

>>> The game-engine, collision and logic run on the server in JavaScript running on Node.js. The clients are simply rendering information sent from the server, and sending off keyboard input.

Source: http://dailyjs.com/2011/01/05/node-roundup/
I found a prepositional error in The New Yorker
Facebook is doing all it can to ramp up supply; I heard that Mr. Zuckerberg made Facebook for the sole purpose of getting laid (his users, not him).
Can't say creator. I have a lot of ideas but the day job is draining too many hours that cannot be dedicated to execute them.
umm, so subcontractors to the government/academia?

sure there were a lot of those. Still, for more than 20 years during 1970-90s private sector largely discarded ARPANet mutating into Internet as an academic toy. All while TCP/IP was invented by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn at Stanford and HTML by Tim Berners Lee at CERN. Yup, two largely government-funded organisations again.
One thing is abundantly clear:

If you're a developer or a designer and you aren't learning at least Android or preferably all three mobile platforms, you're looking at having a huge hole in your skill set by the end of the year.
Nice summary. Must take issue with a couple of points.

"$2 billion revenue for $400 million profit gives a P/E ratio of 125. That is simply nuts."

More likely it means that the sum of Facebook's earnings growth and discount rate needs to be about 15 percentage points higher than your favorite comparison point. Is that nuts? Merely debatable I would say.

"Facebook has scale and can only generate $400 million in profit a year and only a 20% profit margin? That's less than impressive."

Most of their investments can be expensed. Not so surprising really.

I'm not a fan of the product or the stock, but I don't believe absurdity is approaching. Much older Google and Amazon have monetized adequately.
Signing out and back in worked for me. I didn't have to clear the cache.
The iPhone is the market’s Fisher Price smartphone
Electric-Car Startup Coda Gets $76 Million in Venture Funds
>apple used to expect people to pay for redownloads or not allow redownloads at all

Obviously false.

Although it is mildly amusing to watch your syntactical contortions, I'm out.
The article doesn't talk about icons or prettiness or anything like that. The author mostly talks about the user experience and interactions with the toolbar and the clarity of the text in the download buttons.
CA Supreme Court: No warrant needed to search cell phones
I don't know about you, but my social graph is pretty diverse. I wouldn't trust all those very different people to make an important decision like "what sites should be visible to me in search engines."
If it makes you sad because Apple is no longer devoting thousands of pixels at the top of each window to a big "drag this window" control, you'd better brace yourself, because the next step for many consumer applications is to have windows that cannot be dragged at all.

This design looks like an iPad screen to me. Did the implications of Apple's stated mission to "make the Mac more like the iPad" not sink in? The iPad doesn't have draggable windows. And putting big title bars on a nondraggable window is a waste of pixels.

As for the critique of various shades of gray and nonscalable text and laggy performance: It is launch day, people. We are lucky the app works at all. (It apparently doesn't quite work for everyone; those bugs are going to need to be fixed first.) It is hell on earth to meet a Steve Jobs launch date, I'm grateful to all those who made it happen, and I'd like to encourage the rest of the peanut gallery to be patient and see if revision 1.0.1 brings some improvements.
2b) Except when the company is only 1 person. Then the public persona of the individual is the public persona of the company / product.
But 'the PC' is a slippery term. That analyst didn't declare the death of 'the PC' in the sense of "a traditional desktop or laptop computer", he declared the death of 'the PC' in the sense of Wintel. So for example, the Mac is a PC in sense 1, but (still, mostly) not in sense 2. Of course the two phenomena are closely related by now, and the sense-2 PC is under a certain amount of pressure too. But the fate of the traditional desktop/laptop is a much wider question, and more tied in to Big Questions about the future of software.