skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
imagine if code and comments were inverted

# def this_will work
# 42
# end

----------

That's a tl;dr, but you really should Google. Short explanations about things that amount to "write longer and better explanations" bothers me in some meta way.
The more you earn, the more you spend. You could re-write this article "struggling on $250m a year" - the yachts, mansions, family trusts etc take a MASSIVE bite. I dunno how they get by.
Plead HN: Please help improve our new robotics website
Because if we disallowed research that could lead to military applications, we wouldn't do much research at all. Look at all the tech stuff you use everyday and you will realise that most if not all of it have their origin somewhere in a defense lab or contractor.
If they're running such a great business, why would they use a blatantly anti-competitive legal maneuver? Furthermore, if they do want to run the business, why are they making Groupon buy them? Why not just raise the sale price for the domain/trademark?

This move makes Scoopon look like a build-to-flip, rather than a meaningful business on its own, which would worry me if I were one of their customers or merchants.
Yep, homebrew or macports is pretty much a must.
If you are guaranteed 20% of the list price, I forsee devs overpricing their apps in the Amazon store to get a higher minimum payout.

Additionally, even if the best default price is much lower, it just makes their apps look that much better when Amazon's app store says "50% off" or "86% off."
Review our App: Facebook Profile Picture sketcher
Sure. There's fullblown literate programming, which (arguably) has been practiced very rarely. For the scoop on that, check out Knuth:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/lp.html

Here's an example of Adventure done up literate-style by Knuth:

http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

But what we're talking about here is a bit simpler. Writing code has always had this strange quality of having to write for two very different audiences at the same time. You need to address yourself both to the machine, to execute the code, and to human readers, to understand it. (Even if the human reader is only the author.) The entire history of programming languages and paradigms is a history of being able to address the human more and more directly, and the machine less directly, as computers get ever-more powerful and able to perform the extra legwork involved in translating "higher-level" forms.

Literate programming means that you acknowledge this fact -- and try to write and structure your code to be read by people first and foremost. Think of your source code as an essay to be read, rather than a list of commands to be futzed with and hacked until it works.
Thanks, That's a great story. I will have to quote it (in context and if relevant) next time instead of the silly apocryphal parable above.
The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship
The constant trickle of rockets creates a very poor incentive for any economic development, leaving an already troubled region in a spiraling economic downturn and brain drain for those who are able to leave. Other effects will surely be realized as time goes by, the constant disruption of the education system in the entire region comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
10 year old girl discovers Supernova
The merchants in AU benefit from Groupon's worldwide brand and popularity. The customers benefit from having the best merchants doing well-structured deals. 500 cities into their worldwide expansion, Groupon has done this better than anyone.

Remember, the product being sold to businesses is a large quantity of new customers. Anyone can sell deals, but it takes a lot of money and organization to move the needle. If Scoopon thinks they can do this, then more power to them. But play fair.
There is competition in mobile internet, whereas for non-mobile many people only have one or two realistic choices. That could be why mobile gets less regulation.
If you're representing text which contains lots of characters that aren't in ASCII, like say Chinese, UTF-8 will consume much more storage than necessary. There are many languages where non-ASCII characters are extremely common.

He misses a very useful property of UTF-8 as well, it never contains null bytes. This trips up all sorts of heuristics for detecting binary files in various programs if you use e.g. UTF-16 for mostly ASCII text, since it then will contain lots of nulls.

UTF-8 is a very clever way to avoid problems on systems suffering under the mistaken assumption that text is 8-bit byte strings (cough UNIX cough), but that doesn't make it the ideal choice every time.

It is still very common for cross platform tools to not handle file names with non-ASCII characters for example. Both Mercurial and Git suffered from this last I looked.

The reason is that they treat file names as byte strings instead of text in some encoding, and therefore cannot translate to the proper encoding on platforms which treat file names as Unicode text, like Windows and OS X. OS X also uses a somewhat unconventional normalization form, which means you need to handle normalization as well.
This is great! Very clear explanation. Have you looked at AppFirst's (http://appfirst.com) solution? (fyi. I work there)

We have a monitoring solution that covers the application, process, and server level as well as integrating with nagios to cover any other level you have scripts for. It would be great to hear what you have to say about us!
How spammy.
I think it's a question of relative expectations. If we expected people to pay for their own retirement, college, health care, then these people would not be considered "rich." They'd be considered responsible.

The sorry truth is that when people who aren't saving for retirement or college see those who are, they scream "rich"! Then these "not rich" people ride through life saying "I can get by with less," and when it comes time to retire or send the kids to school or pay the hospital, they lean on the government to bail them out.

I guess I'd rather recalibrate expectations. There are truly rich people out there, but those who are breaking even when paying for retirement, health care, and college are not rich. They're responsible, and they should not be asked to carry the masses who are irresponsible.

Bottom line, it takes a ton of money to pay for healthcare, save for retirement, and save for college. A TON. Most people are not doing this. Instead, they're betting the "government," that endless source of wealth, will float them.

As Thatcher said, the problem is, eventually you run out of other people's money.
And how many unpublished studies with null results I wonder?

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

PS non-physicists invoking "quantum stuff" are bullshit merchants, p < 0.001 :-)
Thanks for that advice. I have been debating over a similar feature for a while. I will try to build it ASAP and intimate you about it.
Karma?

From Andrew's Mixergy interview,
http://mixergy.com/andrew-mason-groupon-interview/ -

Talking in regards to the original British owner of Groupon: "...We’re doing something somewhat similar to that in the United States, so, maybe we can work together on this. We can take this to Europe.’ He said, ‘No way.’ We said, ‘Okay. ‘We continued operating. Then we had a trademark for Groupon. That trademark extended to England. We contact him and say, ‘Hey, you can launch that thing, but you can’t use the name Groupon because we have a trademark on it.’ So then, he decided he wanted to sell. I think we bought it in May 2009 or something like that for maybe $250,000, which seemed like a lot at the time and now it seems cheap."
Interesting. I was wondering when folks would be overwhelmed by the content of HTML5 Boilerplate. I expect this trend to continue.

FWIW, these boilerplates are enormously useful for reference and gaining knowledge of how HTML5 works, but rewriting and expanding our personal boilerplates is what we do as front-end devs. We never had a standardized boilerplate for HTML 4, after all.

Personally, I take bits and pieces of knowledge and techniques from these boilerplates, roll them into my own base template, and build on them with each project.
I worked on the design of the site and the CMS. We're very excited to finally be launching!
Full Inspection
US Congressmen and other high officials implicated in foreign spy ring
Nintendo DS Line Outsells PlayStation 2, Nintendo Says
How Non-Developers Can Create Apps
The biggest improvement is that it salts passwords now.
Facebook Fee: $.95

Youtube Surcharge: $1.53

blogging package: $.25

Roaming charge (non approved sites): $5.21

Wikileaks download penalty: $10.00

Destroying net neutrality, killing what made the Internet great in the first place: priceless.
Shared hosting on Dreamhost. Reasonably easy to get setup and going. It's just a sandbox right now.
Remember the leaked slides for differently priced mobile services that leaked out a few weeks ago? http://blog.grouptexting.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/dip....

That seemed like a worst case scenario that we might expect down the road...not within days of the FCC giving mobile broadband a pass on net neutrality. Hopefully this move backfires and forces the FCC to revisit their ruling (http://gigaom.com/2010/12/28/who-wins-and-loses-under-the-fc...)
Sprint usb type mobile broadband plan: $59.99/mo for 5 gigs on 2 year contract.

Verizon usb type mobile broadband plan: $50/mo for 5 gigs on 2 year contract

AT&T usb type mobile broadband plan: $60/mo for 5 gigs on 2 year contract

T-mobile usb type mobile broadband plan: $39.99 for 5 gigs no contract

So yeah, it seems rather unlikely that any cartel like cooperation on tiering would evolve in this market.

(EDIT: Updates, thanks for the pointers. I was cribbing from a dodgy web page it seems http://mobile-broadband-services-review.toptenreviews.com/ )
Excuse me, what?
It's beautifully done. Congrats.

Will install and play with it later tonight.
Clinical researchers too. Because lives are at stake.

The whole field of systematic reviews and meta-analyses has developed around the need to aggregate results from multiple studies of the same disease or treatment, because you can't just trust one isolated result -- it's probably wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analyses

Statisticians working in EBM have developed techniques for detecting the 'file-drawer problem' of unpublished negative studies, and correcting for multiple tests (data-dredging). Other fields have a lot to learn...
Apple could put a little phone icon to the left or right of the auto-generated links. In my usage though phone numbers are very rarely linked (where would they go?), so when I see a linked one on an iOS device I assume it will trigger a phone call.
The fashion version may date back to Nancy Mitford's _The Pursuit of Love_ or _Love in a Cold Climate_, but a) with reference to Schiaparelli, and with the valuation mentioned by a disinterested bystander.
I think the issue is not that anyone is comparing them as equals (as Google isn't a social network, and Facebook isn't a search engine), but that Facebook can take the place of some specific Google searches.

Consider searching for a restaurant in the area you're in. With Facebook, you have the choice of asking your friends (whom you trust), OR you can go wading into Google's search results and manually sort through the SEO'd "111-best-restaurant-review-site.com"-style garbage that populates the first few search result pages.
This is an interesting can of worms and a lesson in being proactive about securing your trademarks and domain names in other jurisdictions whether you intend to launch there or not.

Despite the fact that Scoopon is arguably a real business this really is a domain squatting case. After all Groupon has nothing to do with their business or branding. Registering the trademark and the domain name was preemptive and is leverage to get bought out. I don't really care if they are a real business or not.

Speaking as an Australian, it is important that companies that operate in Australia have a .com.au domain. It's not uncommon for me to tell someone my address (gmail.com) and then find out later they'd tried to send it to gmail.com.au.

I always thought it was a mistake by the UK to use .co.uk instead of .com.uk for consistency reasons but having thought about it, I think it may make the distinction clearer.

So what should Groupon do? Basically they should do what Google did in the UK. For years Google didn't own the gmail name there so branded themselves as googlemail.

By pressing on you're telling the other side that you're not reliant on them giving up the name. It gives you bargaining power.

Suing them is a good idea too. It bleeds money they probably don't have (which clearly Groupon does).

The worst thing Groupon could do is stall their activities waiting for a resolution. Groupon is a time-sensitive business. There's nothing magical about what they do and someone else can replicate it (as happened in Germany I believe).

It would be risky to proceed under the brand name of Groupon however because the trademark muddies the waters. There is the possibility that if Scoopon successfully defend the trademark, Groupon will then be liable for damages for infringing upon it.

Best bet: pick a new brand name, register the trademark and domain name and proceed. Make the other side an offer with a time limit. If they decline, stop talking to them. While this is happening simply proceed. There is infrastructure that needs to be built regardless of the brand name (finding offices, hiring salespeople and copy editors and so forth).

As you gain traction occasionally make them an offer for the name. As time goes on LOWER the offer because by this point you've invested in your new brand so the old one has less value.

At some point the squatters will either give up and sell or it simply won't matter because you'll have built your business on a new brand.
Information Theory by Thomas Cover at Stanford (with video recordings)
It bothers me that the sentiment of this article seems to be "this sort of transaction needs to be illegal" rather than "this isn't a good investment; don't invest".
I'm not sure what the RSS/Twitter/Facebook flame fest is all about. Or I suppose more to the point, why any of us care.

Unless your audience is the extremely narrow TechCrunch demographic, nobody should be making strategic business decisions based on TechCrunch referrer stats.

I suppose this is just a good, old-fashioned brawl in the tech world echo chamber.
Progress bar for RSpec
Societal Networks talk by Prof. Balaji Prabhakar
It is one of my biggest weaknesses, but I figured once I'd proven it possible with whatever domain, I could search out another one. It's in my plan for this year, begin investigating new domains... neither of those seem very fitting, but thanks for considering it!
I'm not sure about that reason either, and I'm an Android developer. From what I seem to be observing, the adoption comes from something more mundane - good price points. Android offers a "good enough" mobile experience for substantial cost savings. In India, for example (where phones are usually sold unlocked and carrier-discounted units are unheard of) iPhone 4 sells for nearly $800, and the highest-end Android phones sell for $500. Nearly $300 difference. Even iPhone 3GS is around $700. That's something you can't ignore, especially in a price-sensitive mobile market like India. I think this will continue to be a big part of the reason for Android adoption, unless Apple gets worried about something as unimportant as the world's largest but maybe least profitable (given how competitive it is) mobile market :)
Interesting that HN traffic seems fairly low quality (assuming Page Visits and Time on Site as measurements of quality - only Stumbleupon and Countermotions provide lower figures on those metrics). Perhaps this demonstrates that HN visitors read the article, then return here to discuss rather than exploring the site.
I remember attempting to write an IRC bot a while back and finding that RFC severely lacking when it came to connecting to whatever irc network I had chosen to test it against. The problem was that the handshake to join the server was different in the RFC than what the server was expecting. This sentiment was mirrored by others I consulted with over IRC that were devs on the epic3 irc client. So, while writing a IRC bot may be simple, I would imagine that writing a client isn't. The protocol itself was the same (in the "COMMAND args" sense), but the conventions differed.
How to measure offline social influence - a first attempt
You need to enter every purchase yourself? If so, is something like Mint along the same line?
- send me a weekly email with a few cool events / venues going on in my city (think private thrillist)
> It is disheartening to see this situation analyzed through ignorant grandstanding rather than serious analysis - ie discussing the situation without distinguishing between credit and cash.

I could not agree more. There are absolutely questions that need answered, but I can't take seriously anyone who has such an incorrect grasp or is intentionally being misleading.
From a comment on his blog:

Wasn't that long ago (j10 years?) that only governments and large businesses could do that.
Which sort of implies that some of them probably were.

Painful to see that kind of logic applied.
Millions of dollars worth of lobbying & Astroturfing.

Check out CTIA's front group 'MyWireless.' They claim to be 'a nonpartisan non-profit advocacy organization, made up of wireless consumers, businesses and community leaders from around the country, supporting reasonable pro-consumer wireless policies.'

In fact they share an office with CTIA and have the same press contact as CTIA. Their net neutrality stance is what you would expect, though the writing is comical: These big online companies - and their blogosphere and celebrity supporters - want to stop wireless carriers from managing their wireless networks - especially wireless Internet...If the FCC and Congress let flashy online companies and their billionaire founders write regulations that favor their businesses, American wireless and Internet consumers will ultimately lose money, choices, security and quality.

Sad, shameless plug - I wrote about this last week. I really didn't expect this to happen so soon: http://blog.grouptexting.com/2010/12/22/lobbyists-astroturfe...
How to Setup a Pentesting Lab
I am afraid these boilerplates will be an excuse for many not to learn a thing about what they are doing, like we had XHTML doctypes slapped onto the pages (or place there by IDEs).
Or even better, Jekyll, which is the tool that powers GitHub Pages: http://pages.github.com/.
Drupal is 10 years old so started back in the dark ages of PHP 3. So it started almost completely procedural but large chunks now have been converted to OOP.

Drupal doesn't follow the MVC pattern but the somewhat less common PAC (Presentation-Abstraction-Control) pattern. See http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/mvc-vs-pac for a good overview of the differences between MVC and PAC and how Drupal implements it.
Netflix Buttons Soon to be Standard on TV Remotes
Well, maybe, but most of us suffer from under-pricing our apps. Amazon's deal only allows them to further discount from your stated 'list price'. I don't see how they can improve things in this common case. I suspect (am utterly sure) they will price things to maximize Amazon's income, not mine. Which may mean deeply discounting my app as part of some campaign to boost their total sales - which won't benefit me one iota.
A decent house in San Francisco, for instance, would be around a million (and it would be smaller than your house in Iowa). You'd have to spend 40k/year just on mortgage payments. It's great that your house payments are less than half, but for certain areas of the country, your house payments aren't viable.

I don't believe 250k would give a family of four a wealthy life in the Bay Area. A comfortable one, but not a wealthy one. Does anyone know what percentile 250k would be for SF? It was in the top couple nationally but I bet it might not even be top 10% here.
I agree with that, and I think these things really started to pop up because it is generally thought that front-end folks are scared-of or don't-know-anything-about HTML5. It's the developers' response to help push HTML5.
As India rises, its rat catchers toil in darkness
It's groupon... backwards.
Bathrooms Interior design Wallpapers
Jure Leskovec: Predicting the future with Social Networks (video)
don't forget the stock options
But for common lisp emacs+slime is the way to go. This is similar to writing .NET in anything but visual studio, or java without eclipse or intelliJ. Of course you can do these things, but it's very likely you'll find some frustration. Of course sometimes using your favorite tool is worth the frustation, sometimes it's not.

Ever since writing an application in Smalltalk (squeak) I've realize that a language and the environment it's edited in are very closely tied together. If 90% of the community of lispers uses Emacs+Slime there's probably a good reason. I don't particularly like Eclipse, but if I'm doing a reasonably large Java project I'll definitely be using it.
11 Ways to Stay Awake at Work
Five ingredients of smart online commerce
Sounds reasonable.

When some people find that their model doesn't quite fit, they make a more accurate model. Others make a less specific model. It's the difference between model parametrization and model selection.

So when we get a dubious result, we can either say "no result" or "possible result". The choice tends to depend on how the finding affects future research. Biology is more exploratory than confirmatory, so they go that way.
Which is sad, considering that HTML5 makes is so very easy to write (valid) HTML off the top of your head:

<!doctype html>
<title>Hello World!</title>
<p>insert important message to world here.
Point taken.
The "warm" is more towards how when you care for someone you want to keep them safe and warm. It's not meant to invoke ventilation blocking imagery.
I suspect that they have to constantly tweak those anyway. They do not have any guarantee that the opponent hasn't got the patterns even if the mission had no obvious failures.

The Dubai could as well have kept this under the rug, hoping to trap the agents on their next mission.
Epic animation in Google Docs
Real Actual Listing Photos: Guess What’s Wrong
what does

> UTF-8 sequences sort in code point order.
You can verify this by inspecting the encodings in the table above. This means that Unix tools like join, ls, and sort (without options) don't need to handle UTF-8 specially.

mean?
Isn't ordering a property that is external to the encoding and language dependent?
(Though AFAICT ls on osx seems to sort fine italian and hungarian alphabets, even if it's unable to handle character length properly :) )

EDIT: got it _code point order_ I'm an idiot
Thanks for this! I love my job, but some days, I find myself getting drowsy right around 3pm ... and I'd have to go grab one or two cokes from the vending machine, which kills me, because I'm trying to cut out sodas from my diet.

I've also started eating salads for lunch, and found it kept me more awake around that time, but didn't know why, until now.
Exactly. "Royalties"? Tax treaties (and "RTFM")? 30% Withholding tax? Bullshit paperwork hoops to jump through? I gave up hope around there.
How Much a Unique Customer is Worth
>[Scheme] is a stripped-down version of Common Lisp.

>Using cdr on a list creates a temporary copy of the list in memory with the first item removed.

Argh, this is painful to read.
Right. You can effectively censor sites simply by putting subscription charges on them. It's a westernised version of China's Great Firewall.