skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do believe this qualifies for "epic". Amazing spread. And awesome job on the "Federation Standard", I got a huge Star Trek vibe immediately.
On Seven Inches (good ruminations about the 7" pad form factor)
I'd be interested in seeing a graph of difficulty of raising kids with age and income -- it probably depends on parenting style, but I think it would (will? maybe.) be easier for me to have kids at 40 with >$bignum than at 18 with $1k, assuming I'm in excellent health for my age (honestly, I'm healthier and more fit at 31 than I was ever before, and hopefully at 35 will be even more so -- not being into exercise early is probably my biggest regret).
I've only got the images and not the text form, I tried running them through Abbey Finereader (the OCR package that PG normally use) a while back and didn't get great results, presumably because of the age of the books. So I'm guessing Project Gutenberg would be unlikely to be able to make use of them.
Undead Labs' Profit-sharing Plan
Happy New Year in Your Time Zone - What's your resolution?
Since we all live in different time zones, I wanted to post this now.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

In America, we have a tradition of making New Year's resolutions. What one thing are you going to do better this coming year, that you know you have to improve? And how are you going to do it?
Remind me again, how many months did the Fannie Mae executives get for bombing the economy?
I am going to get organized by using project management tools, make sure the finances are in place for my company to operate comfortably, so I have lots of time to meet with people and create new opportunities. And hopefully that will free up more time to spend with the people that matter to me the most.
Hack, Loli, the rake/webpy for Haskell?
I'm confused. Splitting water takes energy. The hydrogen can be supplied to the car and a hydrogen fuel cell recombines it to produce energy.

So surely the cars would be running on hydrogen?

Or else, how does one get energy from water (without fusion)?
"Is that not precisely what I said? Laziness."

No. You can't both understand the word "laziness" and attribute that to the explanations I provided.

"I feel like I'm debating with a tired Hallmark card. Yes, high road and all that. We get it."

I feel like I'm debating with somebody who is very intolerant.

"Just as you misplaced the malice quote (you were a little too eager to play that one)"

I did not misplace it, and I stand by the statement, and exactly how I used and formatted it.

"now you're on about punishment: Who said anything about punishment? Saying "Don't hotlink, but we're giving you 30 days grace" is not remotely "punishment". That you portray it as such is, honestly, outrageous."

You're easily angered aren't you. As I said, it would be trivial to contact them directly and tell them about the problem, and not doing so when it would be so easy giving the reason that they should have known better in the first place is a clear kind of punishment yes.

I'm not continuing this discussion with you. I have more fun things to do with my New Years Eve than debate with an angry troll.
I have to admit, this seems to me like nothing more than assisted meditation.
Google: Some mobile software and a few D.C. lobbyists does not a carrier make
Jim Collins (a "management guru" if you're up for that kind of thing) says in Good to Great:

> Leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline---first the people, then the direction---no matter how dire the circumstances.

He repeats the "first who, then what" numerous times as the only way to turn-around a struggling company.
In my experience with several lawyers, many of them argue almost entirely from a position of logical fallacies -- better to win via confusion of the argument than win via logical argument.

Actually, appeal to tradition and appeal to precedent are subtly different things. "We must continue doing a thing because we have always done it" vs "In the past, the reasoning was sound to do a thing, perhaps it is still sound to continue doing that thing".

One absolutely fascinating debate I read online between a non-lawyer and a top-15 US law school dean more or less ended up with the non-lawyer demolishing the lawyer's arguments by assigning every argument to a list of logical fallacies. It was quite poetic. However, the dean kept arguing that the non-lawyer wasn't making legal arguments. Which gives me serious doubts that the legal system is based on logical or even just rational thought.

(if you are interested the debate is here between somebody called "Red County Bound" and "sandersmj", during the recent legal challenges over same-sex marriage, I found it to be one of the most illuminating arguments I could find online
http://www.brambletonian.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=1650... )
I could probably stick them up on S3 fairly cheaply so I'm not really worried about the cost, but I think hosting them myself would likely just be a temporary solution, I'd rather hand them over to someone who could give them a long-term home.

Maybe I should just seed it onto bittorrent, at least that way at least I'll know I'm not the only person who still has a copy of the book scans :-)
I was suggesting webmaster@domain for each of the domains. Not 100% full proof, but no method is.

I'm assuming we're talking about thousands of emails here, not millions.
Ideally, packet class identification would be at the network or transport layer. I don't like the idea of an ISP doing payload inspection ("spying"), either. But your argument about all bits being the same is naive. Do you think it's fair that you should have to pay more for overnight mail or certified mail?
The "many core" problem is this decade's C10K. I look forward to more expert discussion on scaling across massively multi-core architectures.
I can grow a solid beard but the itching of it drives me nuts after two or three weeks. Probably related to other skin problems :-(
I had no idea that Myspace had relaunched as a media hub 6 weeks ago. Not that my own awareness is really a solid metric, but I am a relatively trend aware 20 something. That should say something to Myspace.
One could use a procedurally-generated landscape as a substrate for lots of user-generated and genetic algorithm-produced content.
I agree. Membase wins here :) I use it to /actually/ persist data for a social game with 300k users with no problems, and it also backs FarmVille. I think scale-out data like Membase is the final piece in the commodity-servers-for-scale puzzle.
Microsoft Reports Critical Office Flaw
As telemachos points out, this is not an appeal to authority. The article does not claim that Darwin et al would support this research; it claims that it is consistent with the university's character to publish the work. Furthermore, this sentence reminds us that in prior cases where authority has sought to suppress the university's research, the release was justified by history. It's not a purely deductive argument, but it's impossible to make a statement about the world without relying on inductive examples.
As long as the CDN is configured to transmit its files with a far-future expires header (which Google and Microsoft's CDNs are), the CDN owner can't accurately track usage at all.

In a perfect world, the CDN would only handle one HTTP request per user per expires period (+1 year on Google and Microsoft's jQuery CDN). In reality, the file will be pushed out of or cleared from caches for various reasons, but they still persist long enough to make tracking end-usage of the CDN meaningless.
I didn't think they were deflecting or blaming their source. Sounds like they were just saying that they did the proper due diligence, but there is still a problem.

Apple did the same thing when they were giving tours of their radio-frequency test lab. It's a way of saying, "Yes, there's a problem, but it wasn't sheer negligence."
>I don't see the reason for downvoting parent.

Who knows...people tend to get offended when their reasoning is held to measure against rational thought for some reason.

Given that his argument is supposed to be "we are Cambridge, we have a tradition of logical and rational thinking we are proud of, this research is representative of that tradition, we think that it should not be censored" I found this errant line to really jump out at me.
Pretend to take the high road. Misrepresent what I've said in reply after reply (now you're onto the "don't get angry!" screed which is one of my favorites). Pull the "I'm done!" card just as you've declared me a troll. I see that you've mastered this technique, and your black belt awaits.

I'm not done because I've debated with this ridiculous tactic enough to see it for what it is.

Copy-pasting code that you don't understand is pretty much the definition of laziness.

And just to be clear, it's "trivial" for jQuery to do this, in your mind, because you're not the one having to do it. Probably thousands of tiny sites that are doing this (I doubt it's any big numbers sites), each requiring you to go through the whois process to find a webmaster. Not as trivial as you proclaim.
Ask HN:  Do you hate stock phrases such as "happy new year"?
Do you think it's all mindless talk that should be avoided?
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. Not all discourse is argument. And not everything you say, even in the course of an argument, is itself argument. Here's the full paragraph which includes the mention of Erasmus and company:

>> Second, you seem to think that we might censor a student's thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values. Thus even though the decision to put the thesis online was Omar's, we have no choice but to back him. That would hold even if we did not agree with the material! Accordingly I have authorised the thesis to be issued as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report. This will make it easier for people to find and to cite, and will ensure that its presence on our web site is permanent....

I would say that nothing in the paragraph is anything like a formal argument. The author is not moving from premise to premise towards a conclusion. That whole paragraph is a piece of rhetoric, intended to display to the reader (the person the letter is addressed to and the rest of the world) the values of Cambridge University.

When I mentioned syllogisms above, I wasn't being glib or flip. That part of the letter doesn't belong in the category of argument[1]; it's epideictic[2]. Judging it by some list of logical fallacies is a category mistake.

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epideictic
Performance. Many of your visitors will already have it in their cache.
Could someone tell me what MVP means? I see that term used everywhere on HN, but I don't know what it stands for.
My guild used a DKP (dragon kill point) system for loot distribution, which was fairly common. Basically you earnt points for showing up to raids. When items dropped whoever had the most points and wanted it got it, spending some number of points.

At one point an item was left to rot as no one wanted it.i came to the raid late and passed the corpse. I looked on it and saw the item. Now it was nothing I'd spend points on but I did want to experiment with it so I took it. Someone saw me and an officer who I didn't get along with kicked me from the guild. The guild leader was basically inscribe by that point so wouldn't overrule the officer and that was that.

So I was technically in the wrong but, like many things like this (in game and out), it wouldn't have mattered if I was in the in crowd but I wasn't so it was a valid excuse to get rid of me.

As for playing 16 hours, in the fueled I was in that was normal.

As for being in demand, it's a bit more complicated. Some classes are more desirable than others. I was primarily a rogue, which at this point in the game was largely useless in raids except for scouting and CR. The class balance shifted from expansion to expansion. The next expansion made rogues desirable again.

Plus I HATED the current expansion and had had my fill of raiding pretty much so I didn't pursue other guilds but it would've been toughg to find one with room for a rogue.

Bear in mind that raid sizes were limited. At that time it was 72 people for one expansion and 54 for the next so there was pressure to reduce guild size anyway.

Most guilds operated as close to 100% capacity without going (much) over as possible. To go lower was to be under strength. To go over was to force people to sit on the sidelines, which is no fun.
no, I think that phrases represent the prevailing sentiment and are meant to express what many people feel. People used to write unique poetry to you if they were in love with you. THAT is something I wish would come back. But stock phrases - I like too.
If you are just looking to make a self-contained file that has the page as image, I would suggest you simply embed the image as base64.

I made a bitmap -> <table> once, that was pure hell like this. ;-)
I would say that Google searches for programming languages would be a little better as a benchmark. As it denotes the number of new users trying to learn a language (demand).

Google Trends for (some) functional languages: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=erlang%2...

Just a shame that you can't add more than 5.
Have you heard of Noctis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis

It's a facinating game.
Not to mention that referencing the latest version means that your code will be untested against anything but the library version you built against.
Misperceived by a Machine
If it didn't, it wouldn't have upwards of 6 million subscribers.
Sounds like not much has changed between 2010 and 2011.

According to the author's taxonomy, this is linkbait.
> The main reason I prefer HN because of the quality of comments.

Agreed. Reddit is great for silly comments, while HN has serious discussion and insightful analysis.
I don't want to put this guy down or anything but

"He’s a poet.
(written over 1,000 poems and 350 in 07′ alone)"

made me laugh out loud. Is he planning to double his poetic output next year?
It seems like there are a number of states (beards), with transitions only being possible between some of those states. Map that all out and it's a graph theory problem - how many can you visit in one go?

We can transform it into a more classic problem (visit every single node) by adding more edges with weights, where the weight is how long it would take to grow enough beard to make an otherwise invalid transition.
Smogzer's method for "How to see yourself in every beard type" :

1) Grow a huge beard.
2) Put yourself in a comfortable and repeatable pose, i.e. fixate a point in space, shoulders back, make sure you are able to repeat the position you are in.
3) pick 1-5 camera poses around you.
4) with your huge beard take pictures from every camera position in various lighting settings, or have a friend do it.
5) shave, standing in place if it has to.
6) take pictures again.
7) with photoshop or gimp overlay the beard picture on top of the beardless one and delete and clone parts of your beard !
8) since this is hacker news, the post would not be complete if you do not:
8.1) create a startup from it ;)
Evil.js
"Then he began reciting the names of every single one of 415 colors listed in a paint catalog: damson dream, dauphin, dayroom yellow, dead salmon…and on and on and on."

I had that paint catalogue! We made a game out of trying to remember the names based on their (frequently ludicrous) descriptions. Good time killer on a long journey.
Your argument just seems dogmatic to me. I suppose my comment was not constructive. It is interesting that you have inferred that I don't care about the poor from my post.
I don't know about bittorrent, to a lot of "normal" people that smacks of piracy. I think S3 is a much better idea. Once you get some publicity and traction, which I'm sure you will, you can then ask for volunteers to host them.

I for one am looking forward to reading from these books to my son on my iPad!
We did a lot of analysis of the sites that were actually hotlinking, and are planning to reach out to those that are above board and should know better. By and large, however, most of the sites that were hotlinking were porn/phishing/generally nefarious, which weighed heavily into our decision to pull the plug relatively soon. Serving people who need jQuery and jQuery UI documentation, etc., is a higher priority than not-pulling-the-rug-out-from-under networks of porn sites - people who have more than adequate access to their own hosting and distribution resources.
Do you also object to saying "Please", "Thanks", and "Have a nice day"?
Bankers rarely want a "free market". They do want to be free of restrictions to their potential to make money.

Here's an example:

In a "free market" the government wouldn't mandate that all banks that offer credit/debit cards provide liability limits for fraudulent activity. Those liability limits (which apply to everyone) in effect subsidize inherently insecure payment methods and impose enormous barriers for competitors to enter the market.
wait somebody photoshoped the girl in right!
OTOH, TaylorSwift.com was also hotlinking, which is pretty awesome.
Double down my investment of time in things I love doing.
This is a pretty interesting list, mostly because I think they took what seemed like a 'normal' guess, and stretched it a bit.

All of this happening would be pretty awesome, though.
Congrats to Lingt. Nice to see some exits for YC S09!
Show HN: maze race game (using Eller's algorithm)
Don't forget this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=081dHOYY6IE
Inspired by the maze generation algorithm that was up here on Wednesday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048752), and having some rare free time,
I made a little maze race game.

I'd love some feedback from the HN crowd. Is it fun? What would make it more fun?
(Can you beat 18?)

It looks best in a WebKit browser, but ought to work in anything down to and including IE6. Works on iOS too, though there it's only really playable on an iPad in landscape orientation.
I would suspect that the density leading to more walking also aids greatly in that guideline, much like the denser US cities on the East Coast.

My wife's grandmother lives in Den Hague, and she has a Great Aunt who lives in a tiny town called Terneuzen (which apparently I never pronounced correctly, judging by native reaction). Two years ago, we went all over Holland, starting with a few days in Amsterdam. The biking culture was quite the shock to the system. Not just people biking to and from work, but everywhere. I remember riding trains and seeing bike lanes between cities. Kind of a revelation to me. I found it completely fascinating. The bike racks overflowed with so many bikes that I have no idea how folks keep track of where they left their bike.

I've unfortunately let my tech skills get rusty by moving into a project management position these last few years, and I don't speak Dutch. That said, I would immigrate there in heart beat if I could figure out a way to do so that wouldn't break our finances (I'm trying to get up to speed on Ruby to perhaps the point where I could consult/work remotely). Everything just seemed to make sense in that country, very logical people. Not only the biking, but their attitude towards social programs and families I found very refreshing.

Tot ziens!
What a straw man. Who are these supposed minimalist developers who read no books, avoid the internet, and just sit on a mountain eating rice and coding all day?

I recognize this minimalist movement too, and I participate in it somewhat, but exposure to new ideas is not only compatible with it, it's essential! Great developers go to meetups, read tech blogs, swim in the Github sea, and maintain a balanced lifestyle. Then maybe they go sit at bare desk with a Macbook Air and fire up their minimalist code editor.
Google for the below

site:news.ycombinator.com what does mvp stand for
The TIOBE index is the homecoming queen at the school for the homely.

If you are going to date one of these girls, also check these out:

http://lang-index.sourceforge.net/

http://www.dataists.com/2010/12/ranking-the-popularity-of-pr...
• Research chip

• IA-32

• 48 cores, 24 tiles of 2 cores each

• ☞ Caches are not coherent ☜

• On chip message passing system between tiles

• Application level voltage/frequency control to manage power

• 25 to 125 watts, 1.3B transistors

• Has booted Linux
Ask HN: What are you thankful for from 2010?
The year is almost gone, what are you thankful for from this year?
120 bucks, actually.
Easy To Create Simple Collage In Adobe Photoshop
Easy to create Simple Collage in Adobe Photoshop tutorial,in this tutorial we are make collage effect in adobe photoshop tutorial.
Oh, the humanity. Why would you do this (apart from "Because I can")?
may be you are a scary good programmer now I may guess?
Ask HN: What are your 2011 resolutions?
I'm curious to find out.
(long time lurker here.. this topic is too close to home to just lurk)

I'm working on a startup that is taking this concept and applying it to social gaming. We're calling ourselves "Zynga for Heath." We're normalizing activity data from public API's from exercise devices like Fitbit, Nike+, Map My Fitness, biometric devices, etc and assigning it an activity score. Basically, rewarding players for working out, parking farther away from the store, and even just walking around the shopping center. A huge goal for us is partnerships with companies like 24 hour fitness to reward their members in-game.

This score is then used in our game that will be running on Facebook/iOS to reward the player with points that they use to continue building up their fitness/sports world. Our normalization platform will give us the ability to create multiple types of games to appeal to more than just the existing social games that are out on Facebook.

We're very early into our development process, but would love to keep the Hacker News community posted, if interested.

Our info site is http://www.neufit.com/
Really wish Steve could expand beyond the soundbyte and go deeper into how they hire, manage, do product dev, etc. Very much looking forward to the biography he is supposedly working with Walter Isaacson on.
It's a small thing but has saved me considerable aggravation.

I am thankful that Apple finally ended it's Byzantine certificate and provisioning nightmare with XCode 3.2.5 and now it is fairly automatic.
You can do it in your .htaccess file. Define some extensions that are blacklisted and redirect referrers outside your own domain to a place of your choice.

CPanel allows you to do this directly (although you might want to back up your .htaccess file first).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_(novel_series)

Seriously, I've read these about twice a year since they came out. His Chaos series is very good too. More fantasy than sci-fi tho.
Wish HN: a great 2011
It seems like by the end of any given year, most people take a chance to think about everything they did (and hopefully, everything they're planning on doing next). Here's to hoping that you rocked it in 2010, and are already planning on doing even better in 2011. Happy new year, everyone!

I'm curious, what are your new years resolutions? Share them if you have them!
I would assume he takes a screenshot of the page (xbrow.se is one utility for it) and then picks the colour from each point and displays it... quite simple to do, why is probably a better question :p
MVP: Minimum Viable Product.
This might get you started:

http://fora.tv/2010/07/27/Jesse_Schell_Visions_of_the_Gamepo...