skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm using lxml with a bit of C for the scrapper behind Printful. My algorithm is way more complex than Readability and I can still parse web pages really fast. For example, parsing a long article from NYTimes on a really old machine:

fiam@raichu:~/printful$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

processor	: 0

vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD

cpu family	: 6

model	: 8

model name	: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+

fiam@raichu:~/printful$ python readable.py http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/world/europe/25moscow.html > /dev/null

Took 0.193097171783 seconds for http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/world/europe/25moscow.html

I'd say that hosting something like this on App Engine, which prevents you from using C extensions, is not a very good idea.

Edit: formatting
LinkedInLabs: visualise your network
Admittedly, it can be difficult to figure out a company symbol. But, I would expect you to be clued in before you bought it going through a due diligence processes.

1. Does the balance sheet make sense? Do industry and manufacturing companies have a lot of money tied up in capital expenses?

2. Most online finance websites show related companies. Does other technology and TV manufactures show up on the list? Do their competitors?

3. Does the price seem right? Are you trying to buy a hot new stock for $20 or $30 dollars a share, when no recent split occurred? Is the price <$10?

As you research the company and dig in, I would expect SOMETHING to make you say, "that can't be right" along the way.
As an American I noticed that when I visited Toronto, Canadians would always compare things to "North America" (as in "Toronto has the 7th largest metro area in North America").

Interestingly, the meaning of this would typically exclude Mexico and Central America, which by geography it should not.

Whereas in the US, we typically compare things to "America" and exclude Canada and Mexico as a matter of course.
Ask HN: Anyone have a CR-48 they are not using?
An anon account since I did not want to get flamed by those that troll for no good reason...But I am a loyal HN reader, many times a day..

I really wanted to receive a CR-48 so I can move to a more cloud based way of working. I started an NPO and boy what a process this has become. Very involved, but I am learning so much. The NPO deals with getting school supplies to students who's parents cannot afford them otherwise..

I am always on the go. Driving, flying and I lose productivity time because I cannot achieve a workflow that works for me.

My MacBook is great, but no 3G, bigger than I would like, etc.

My iPad 3G helps, but a serious lack of good apps that work for me. An onscreen keyboard is tough and carrying around a blue tooth is not a solution, really it isn't.

I applied for a CR-48 as an NPO but nothing yet and I am going to be spending literally weeks traveling starting next thursday!

Can anyone help me out with a solution?
Don't address these rhetorical questions to me, using me as a straw man. I didn't assert people are spreading FUD about "inadvertent" infringement. The author did.The author uses "inadvertently" right in the first sentence, as the very premise of the article. So get out of my face with your lecturing.

It's all there in the first sentence of the article. : his definition of "FUD" , the "inadvertent" infringing premise. My criticism is that the article fails as a self contained piece of reasoning. It convinces me the FUD spreaders could be right.
What The Future of Social Networking Looks Like
You're also not factoring in the maintenance costs of owning a house, which are also siphoning value out of that "savings account".
Dropbox syncs every time you view an Office document because Office creates hidden lock files every time you open something in not-read-only mode. It's synchronizing the lock file, which is designed precisely to prevent conflicts.

I'd like a local-conflict view, yes. They do actually exist on your machine (in a hidden folder inside your Dropbox folder), Dropbox downloads all conflicts all the time. I ran across this behavior when I caused a conflict in my work TrueCrypt file - pulling a gig took a while. But the web interface is almost entirely useless for comparing such a file, or any file metadata conflicts, because you need to open it to examine the contents.
What data structure has a more efficient access pattern?

People default to arrays because 95% of the time they are either the best option or good enough that it's not worth worrying about.
Indeed. Sass and Compass have been doing this for years. Using mixins for CSS framework rules so markup stays semantic is basically the core concept behind Compass.
Needs to be more crooked. If the HTML 5 includes CSS3, then the HTML 4 badge needs to include all the CSS2 features that never got widespread support.
Since housing is a proxy for net migration, what are the stats for NYC?
"My point is that you don't need to fiddle with Linux. You can, but you don't have to. You don't need to spend hours configuring anything."

What are you basing that claim on, just your own personal experience? It's a pretty extraordinarily claim to say that linux on the desktop requires no configuration, and I think such a claim deserves at least a little bit of evidence above and beyond your own personal experience.

As a counter example to your claim, I just finished installing Ubuntu 10.10 on an Asus EeePC 1015. In the process I ran into the following issues: 1) Wireless doesn't work without additional drivers 2) Multitouch input doesn't work 3) Samba sharing with a windows pc doesn't work. The Asus EeePC isn't exactly an exotic piece of hardware, so it's difficult for me to comprehend why ubuntu can't get wireless working, let alone the other issues. Rewind back to Ubuntu 10.04, and in the default install, X won't even start.

"In Linux, all drivers come bundled with the operating system. On Windows or a Mac you have to install them yourself."
In my experience the complete opposite is true. When installing linux I have to go download my wireless drivers using a wired connection, same goes for my printer. On a fresh install of windows 7 (from a RTM version - i.e. not what the manufacturer includes on the machine) everything works "out of the box", including wireless, the touchpad, and my wireless printer.

Now I'm not disputing the fact that linux has made significant gains in usability over the past 17 years, but I will strongly dispute the claim that everything generally works without additional tinkering and configuration.
"Also a little regret knowing they will never go back."

Wow, I had never thought of that aspect of the Apollo program. It's a little sad that of the 22 people to orbit the moon, land on the moon, or both, it appears just four of them ever made a subsequent space flight.
Perhaps I'm just a GPL fanboy, but I don't see how it's a failing of the FAQ to provide a very clear, and understandable, path to not violating the license. And, I don't see how documenting a strict and good faith approach to following the license is in any way in conflict with the original article.

If you read the FAQ (and the license), and follow the terms clearly laid out therein, you can't possibly be in violation of the license and you can't possibly put yourself in a situation where you accidentally force your code to become Free Software (though that's a nearly impossible outcome, even if you don't understand the GPL on any level, which is the point of the original article).

The FAQ even truthfully covers the situations wherein a company might want to use the GPL for a Free Software version of their code while also retaining copyright and offering other licenses (I've had to refer to this particular FAQ many times in flame wars about my own products over the years, since I always hold the copyright on the products I'm dual-licensing, and I use the GPL for the Open Source releases), and while the ethical position of the FSF often creeps into legal discussion, the facts are still quite clear.

I'm not sure I understand why the "real question" would be "how can I use this code without distributing it under the same terms I received it under?" Aren't we assuming good faith on the part of the "victim" of the GPL?

Frankly, all the flame wars about the GPL and the FSF always seem motivated by something other than lack of clarity about the license. They seem based on disagreements with the motives of the FSF, and I find it disingenuous to make it about the license (which is clear to most people who actually read it, and among the best documented software licenses in the world for those who can't grasp its nuances merely from the license itself). If you don't like the Free Software concept, and think BSD or public domain or something else is better for you, or your business, or your customers, or whoever, then say so. Don't argue that the GPL is incomprehensible or the FSF is trying to hide facts about the GPL (the documentation for the GPL v3 is very enlightening and transparent about loopholes in v2 they've tried to close and their reasoning for the changes and additions to the license), as it really isn't.
My only issue with that approach is that of holiday days.

I can see so many ways that that can go wrong. To me, the reason it works seems more like peer pressure than enjoyment of work.

I love what I do, I love coding, and I also know that I love taking a week out to not care about everything I do at work. If I was in a system like that, I'd feel kinda pressured to keep up with my colleagues and not let the team down. Not by my friends and officemates, but by the knowledge that if I take a week off, that's a week they've got to handle the work I'd do. There's rarely a 'good' time to take holidays, especially in smaller teams.

It could work, it is certainly possible, but it seems an unnecessary area where pressure can occur when a team is under stress. To be honest, I think it could work better with the caveat that everyone has to take a certain minimum level of holiday.

Sick days however make perfect sense.
That might be what makes it unattractive for pirates. I think filehosters pirates use don’t have that kind of bandwidth limitation. (If 10GB is the cap, a 600MB movie could only be downloaded about 17 times.)

I think that hosters like Rapidshare have an upload quota but no bandwidth limit. Bandwidth is limited for downloaders, not uploaders. (It’s impossible to download much without paying but an uploaded file will not become inaccessible because too many people download it.)

Rapidshare obviously makes money with piracy so they cleverly encourage it without overstepping legal boundaries. Dropbox is a very different company, I don’t think it would be good for them to be seen as a tool used be pirates which is why the cleverly discourage it.
I'm the developer of Routesy (routesy.com), a public transit app for SF Muni/BART/Caltrain/AC Transit. My app has been around since the first day of the app store, and I get asked this question all the time.

The short answer is that Apple gives me two important things:

1. A decent development platform with UI controls that provide a good, familiar user experience
2. A marketplace that lets my app make money so I can afford to continue developing it

I've done some offline app development using HTML5 as well, and these apps just don't "feel" the same. Had I taken the HTML5 route, it would have been far easier for me to port my app to Android (which I haven't done yet), but my experience has been (at least for productivity and utility apps) that the more native an application feels, the better it sells.
You Didn’t Really Think You Were Eating "Beef" at Taco Bell, Did You?
I don't care what it is, it tastes good....
We're using node.js to run readability in. It's actually working out pretty well and is blazing fast on a dedicated computer (or run of the mill PC), the problem is really the overhead involved with virtualization.

I think it takes around 0.5 seconds on a PC, a lot of this resulting from a pure javascript implementation of pretty much everything.
How Dropbox is printing money
I posted more pictures:

http://luigimontanez.com/2011/cr-48-with-decals/
I'm using Chrome 10 Dev, Windows XP and the textarea/input work fine.
System Admins R.I.P.?
But when you get closer…:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/a...
Cr-48 Chrome Notebook with Decals (pics)
Heh. That's something I dislike about dealing with the public. You suggest 2-3 slots, you're an a-hole for being hard to reach. You don't, you're an a-hole for putting the onus on them.
Theoretically.

There are .NET interop assemblies[1], for working with Office documents, and they require Office to be installed to work. Outside of that, you're stuck rolling your own Office-document-parser.

There is a built-in "track changes" mechanism, though I don't know if all Office types handle it. Word does, at least. Though that's pretty basic.

[1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/dd183191.aspx
Thanks! Hadn't scrolled down all the way.

Not sure how common it will be for a user to add dozens of recipes at once, but I'm finding it tiring to go back and copy in all of the instructions. For a user like me, the awesome thing about YumTab is having all of my recipes in one place, so copying over the instructions is essential.

Is there any way to make it easier to add info manually, at least while you work on scraping the instructions? For now, I'm having to run the bookmarklet, refresh My Recipes on YumTab, click on the newly added recipe, click edit, go back to the original recipe, copy the instructions, go back to YumTab, and paste it.

For now, allowing manual input within the bookmarklet could help.
A lot of his point was that there's a difference between real and nominal terms. He was saying real estate is a hedge against inflation; in that context, saying that "the $80K house 10 years ago now costs $150-200K" is perfectly relevant.
Yeah I turned the jpeg quality down to 30 to save bandwidth will definitely crank it up to 60 now.

Yeah design needs some work, started writing this on Friday.

Thanks for the heads up on those issues.
actually I think pets.com might have been Hummer Winblad's first losing investment. in any case they admitted afterwards that it was a mistake on their part -- they were worried they were getting to the opportunity late and overcompensated. so it really was a classic bubble situation.
Morningside Heights is also expensive because of Columbia University.
I prefer the one from The Oatmeal, http://theoatmeal.com/comics/state_web_winter

Near the bottom. With the duct tape and nails.
ahh I've heard of that before. It is the idea that markets are perfect. But in reality, you only need to find one house that is improperly priced. Given banks are pretty tight on lending now, a borrower who can convince the bank to lend is better placed to offer a lower price.
I think, a lot. Here's a nifty little FFT code. Hey FFT's are kind of generic, right? This one's only 40 lines of C. I'll just copy and paste this one little function. Nobody'll ever know.

Or maybe nothing so complex as an FFT. Maybe it's a little code for charting. Who knows. Developer picks it up a snippet off the net somewhere, and it appears in your code base.

Then there's "derived works". Developer uses some working code snippet as a starting point, transforms it, specializes it, does a lot of work to it, but it's still derived work. I don't think developers think of it as plagiarism. Just "freedom". ;) But developers don't always protect the best interests of the company.
You don't "inadvertently" spread GPL'd code all throughout your codebase, unless you're one of those people who just copy-paste code from the internet everywhere.
These companies should wait until they actually have something cool before making statements like "Forget apps, OnSwipe is the future of publishing."
It could be off, but it is a worthless non-scientific statement that is terribly off-topic to boot.
You've picked apart the use of one word, "stolen", used seemingly in place of "inadvertent" earlier in the article. You haven't refuted the logical premise of the article in any meaningful way. This isn't a smoking gun refuting the point of the article.

The fact is that inadvertent infringement, such as someone copy/pastes a few lines of code from GPLed code without awareness of its origin, does not impose a requirement on the entire work. It merely means you either rewrite the offending code (call it "stolen", "borrowed", "misplaced", "inadvertently copied", whatever you want), obtain the code under a different license from the original author (this is entirely plausible, and I've sold licenses in the past in this way on code I held the copyright to and licensed under the GPL), disable that feature, stop distributing the code entirely, or whatever you want to do. You simply are not forced to GPL your code, and it's FUD to suggest that a license would somehow force you to do so.

I'm not saying the article is the best written or most coherent defense of the GPL ever, but its primary premise is correct. You can't "accidentally" GPL your codebase by incorporating a piece of GPL code.
Is this what Dropbox is doing? Storing just one copy of each unique file? It would make sense for large files.
UFC goes to the mat with Justin.tv over infringement
Mapping Profanity on Twitter
Spain Pioneers QR Codes to Track Ancient Artifacts
ISTM that whoever has the more constrained schedule should state their constraints first, to save time searching the space of possible meetings. I think of telling the other person to tell you a time as stating, I expect your schedule is the more constrained one, so you should state your constraints first.
Unless they are a government entity which is recognized as a certificate authority, or which can exert influence over one.
Also noteworthy: RPG --- a language originally designed to look like a notation for the control panel wiring on IBM's relay-controlled punched-card tabulators (the stuff that gave them a monopoly on industrial data processing before World War II). This was particularly obvious in some of the original training material for the language (referring to it by its first name, FARGO), which showed wiring and FARGO statements side by side.

This language has, of course, continued into modern-day use. Apparently it has not yet been extended to support object-oriented programming, but there are rumors that IBM might try that for the next release...
You guys might also find this version of the HTML5 logo amusing: http://dribbble.com/shots/104300-3d-HTML5-Animated-Gif
And your point is, people shouldn't do that? Well, you're not convincing me that the GPL doesn't spread virally and inadvertently then.
In this case, DHH seems to have provided the appropriate hedge:

> You might be thinking, "This is crazy -- it would never work at my company." And you may be right. But I think there’s a greater chance that it would work. If you’re apprehensive, try experimenting with one team or division.
Ask HN: Anybody uses Ruby on Rails with EventMachine (for certain actions)?
We would like to use async processing for certain requests in our Ruby on Rails app (since requests are I/O intensive with high latency but CPU light). Is there any framework which does that?
(In perfect world we would use node.js, but that has other problems)
Good points. I think the idea of setting up registration for another site on your own site is sort of defeating the purpose. I'm sure everyone browsing the web as heard of Facebook, do they have an account? Likely.

It'll be interesting to see how Twitter progresses as a connecting tool. Obviously Facebook is superior as far as numbers go, but I don't think we'll ever see one agreed upon way to connect users to sites. Facebook just seems to make the most sense at this point.

It would be nice to see some additional social aspects we could use to add to site engagement. Liking and tweeting is one thing, but what about onsite functionality? OneTrueFan is a digital check in - is that what's next?
If interest rates go up and the person who you're renting off has a mortgage on the place and his interest rates go up - your rent will go up.
Use of City boundaries instead of MSA makes this inaccurate and not terribly useful as a tool for understanding anything about these markets, let alone making decisions from.
Not quite sure what you mean with "dotted-decimal", but accessing my local server at 192.168.etc works fine in Safari, both iPad and iPhone.
Well...I am not 100% sure, but that's the only logical thing given that if you tried that example I gave you with the 241MB file, it uploaded in a minute or two.

This is just me putting 2 and 2 together.

If they aren't, they should be :)
The United States of Shame (Map)
Fascinating... but so many lines! I'm sure there are some really cool unexpected connections in there, but it's just a mass of arcs and circles...
Learn to use Firebug (http://getfirebug.com).

It is one of my most indispensable tools in debugging HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's also one of the only remaining reasons I still use Firefox for web development. The tool is simply a life saver if you learn it like the back of your hand.
Book People Are So Damn Stone Age
This problem only exists in most circumstances because the vast majority of people don't use adequate calendar software, much less set them up so the information can be shared with random-person-X, much less in a safe manner (public/private/busy time display options). Not that I think any calendar software out there now is particularly nice to use, but that's a different issue (though it may be the cause of the first).

USE CALENDAR SOFTWARE. The problem goes away. Just share links, overlay, and look for gaps in the method of your choosing.

More on topic: entirely disagree. Which is more annoying: me listing off time after time after time that of course is unlikely to fit into their clearly-busier schedule, or asking if they have free time soon? Prior to getting a job, I could just start asking about hour after hour, endlessly, until they say yes, or I could say "any day, between midnight and midnight".

If your schedule is busier than theirs, yes, it's rude, because you'll have to say "no" a whole lot. That's rude because it's a waste of time. But when you're trying to meet up with "(potential customers, investors, biz dev partners, employees, journalists)", ie, people you probably will take time out of your day to deal with, offering them the choice is closer to a compliment, as you're basically saying they're more important than you.
Internet body may use up IPv4 addresses this week
I'm speaking of myself as a person of southern Chinese descent. As one progresses north, people are physically taller.

Transcontinental railroad - it's a testament of hard work despite physical limitations.

"because hyper competitiveness leads no where." I lived in Malaysia and Singapore, and I'm speaking of the declining marginal utility of hyper competitiveness. It is a kind of mania that leads to overinvestment in a sector at the expense of another.
Soccer, Game Theory and Dives
As the grandparent said, "It's hard for a master to think like a student."

This is perhaps the biggest obstacle for people who are trying to teach others to program - and so I agree with you here.

However, it does seem like there are some people who will just never be able to pick it up - even though they are demonstrably smart in other areas.
To me the post seems to state the facts with such certitude that you might want to put that disclaimer a bit higher.
RIP Jack.

If you want to see what he was like, Ross Enamait has collated some favourite clips: http://rosstraining.com/blog/2011/01/24/rip-jack-lalanne/

Absolute legend.