skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just pressed "publish" on this book only hours ago. I'm happy to answer any questions.

From the back cover:

Implementing an Artificial Intelligence algorithm is difficult. Algorithm descriptions may be incomplete, inconsistent, and distributed across a number of papers, chapters and even websites. This can result in varied interpretations of algorithms, undue attrition of algorithms, and ultimately bad science.

This book is an effort to address these issues by providing a handbook of algorithmic recipes drawn from the fields of Metaheuristics, Biologically Inspired Computation and Computational Intelligence, described in a complete, consistent, and centralized manner. These standardized descriptions were carefully designed to be accessible, usable, and understandable. Most of the algorithms described were originally inspired by biological and natural systems, such as the adaptive capabilities of genetic evolution and the acquired immune system, and the foraging behaviors of birds, bees, ants and bacteria. An encyclopedic algorithm reference, this book is intended for research scientists, engineers, students, and interested amateurs.

Each algorithm description provides a working code example in the Ruby Programming Language. Source code and additional resources can be downloaded from the books companion website online at http://www.CleverAlgorithms.com

EDIT:

Forgot to mention the book is in paperback, free PDF, and free online as a webpage. You can also fork the content on github at https://github.com/jbrownlee/CleverAlgorithms
There is a difference, though, OS X and Win apps ask for things that generally make no sense to a user, even if the app tried to explain them. 'I'd like to send tweets pretending to be you' is at least mildly meaningful unlike 'I'd like to BE you' which is the sort of permission desktop apps are stuck asking for.
The Chrome team excepted. I absolutely agree they have perhaps the highest commitment to UX of any browser. It feels like a miracle that it’s a Google app.

But a counter-example or two doesn’t disprove the rule.

Have you used AdWords lately? Discovered any pain points? My complaints are pretty numerous, and that’s the #1 cash cow.
Looks like the server can't take the load.
SQLSTATE[08004] [1040] Too many connections

The 'revolution' is off to a great start...
It's wasting its buzz time, then. If (that is, When) this hubbub blows over and we think of Quora as "that thing that never caught on" it will already be too late to gain traction.
Don't rewrite.

Instead get yourselves Microsoft MVC 3 and learn that.

- Since you already do asp.net you don't have to learn a new language, C# or whatever you currently use will be fine.

- It installs side-by-side with your existing dev and production environments and you can use the the very latest and completely awesome Razor view engine[0]

- Make a new version of a single ASPX page that you want to rewrite. Use the fancy URL rewriting features of MVC 3 to send some clients to the new version of the page while everyone else still gets to see the old one.

- Upgrade your database to SQL Server?

This way you bring your tech up to date without the risk of a huge rewrite. And you get benefits for your clients very quickly even if you can't help everyone at the same time. Even if there's always some legacy ASP pages left in your system, so what? If they still work then just leave them there.

[0] http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/10/22/asp-net-mv...
Actually USB plugs go into RJ-45 sockets remarkably well. I've done it before and it felt "right" to the point where I was confused why the mouse wasn't working.
At the same time as I agree with you, I also use these kind of apps. Typically they are faster and also offer better integration with the native features of the phone than a browser experience does. Perhaps you should take up the challenge and make an HTML5 equivalent and see how well you can do?
Diaspora had the money and popular backing, but it also looks as if they made some fairly unfortunate design decisions which meant that they couldn't run on ARM based servers (the "freedom box" concept).
I have a couple of invitations, just drop me a line to my mail with your portfolio.
It's happened lots of times before and will happen lots of times in the future. On the other hand, now that the App Store is out, everybody that buys Pixelmator sends 30% of $29.99 to Apple, so... :)
Pixelmator does a lot more besides - it's closer to Paint.NET on Windows, which is also rather good.

Seashore was another MS Paint-like editor for Mac, but looking at the current screenshots, it seems to have expanded scope now.
Not a bad way to start my own day! Sorry I can't offer more insightful comments.
Total Validator suspension
People who use Linux on the desktop are, statistically speaking, not even close to normal.
Why just Google or Facebook? I've been rejected more times than I care to remember and usually there was not even a rejection letter, let alone direct feedback of any shape or form.
captchas really aren't particularly suited to the task. The difference between even the most forgetful user and the lowest key bruteforce is so many orders of magnitude that it should be trivial to detect. I have no idea what facebook does, but most services just make it too slow to be practical: progressively slower responses, rate limiting, lockout periods. Another approach is to fail all authentications over a rate limit so that even if the correct password is guessed the attacker doesn't know. Long story short is defending a service against brute forcing is generally pretty easy.
At least it is small. Reddit is Fun is ~2MB with no Move to SD support (not to mention broken in many various ways).
On the other hand, the (strange, considering MacPaint) absence of a built-in image editor has led to a very healthy ecosystem of small, "indie" image editors on OSX: Pixelmator, Acorn, Seashore, Paintbrush, DrawIt and Sketch, ChocoFlop, and even more "niche" products like Picturesque.
That is a brilliant image. Who made that?
I'd still not be too inclined to apply anywhere with a heavy CS slant, even though all the theoretical stuff interests me a lot.

I'm with you there...I don't think I'd fit in at a hardcore engineering shop like ITA where you'd have to live and breathe algorithms. But at places where you're just building and maintaining straightforward web apps, you don't need to be able to give a lecture on computer theory, you just need to know how to code, and how certain practices affect security, scalability, performance, or maintainability. These are the places where you'll find CS guys who like to talk a big game, but the codebase is messy and full of hacks. In my experience, the CS guys at these places spent all of their time learning theory and how to architect on whiteboards at school, but they never learned how to write good code. This is where I shine, because when the lights go down and the crowd goes silent, no one cares about how many chords you know, or whether you can play a harmonic minor scale...they just want to know if you can hit notes.
This would suggest Apple already think highly of Pixelmator: http://www.apple.com/mac/app-store/great-mac-apps.html
Sorry, by "web" I meant websites. Mobile layouts are nice when they are implemented correctly. The worst case is when a mobile version routes your request to a default landing page rather than the requested article or whatever or strips out functionality that exists in the regular version.

I expect that things will only improve as more people access the web via mobile devices. I think I use my phone more than a standard computer these days.
Or any page that points to a page that lets you log in to a site must be accessible over HTTPS-only. Or any page that points to a page that points to a page... you get the idea. SSL everything, or you lose.
I don't understand the appeal of those plug computers when you can get a VPS for ~$60/year.
Webkit had to request changes to the tests in in Acid2.

The Wikipedia page mentions that Acid3 was also updated to match Firefox's change in behavior:

"On 2 April 2010, Ian Hickson made minor changes to the test after Mozilla, due to privacy concerns, altered the way Gecko handles the :visited pseudo-class."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3#Development_and_impact
If you only care about the features in 10-year-old versions of Photoshop, then sure, that’s probably true.
The Technology behind L.A. Noire [vid] (Motion Capturing Faces in a Video Game)
Maybe you're right, and maybe they want to stay small for now. In which case the linked article is misleading in comparing Quora with StackOverflow.

That doesn't change the fact that I do everything I can to avoid websites that tell me to sign up first. It just feels incredibly disrespectful.

Facebook might be able to get away with "sign up first, and we'll show you what this shit is all about", but not your average startup.
And if the page that has the link to the login form isn't served through SSL, it's subject to alteration by a man in the middle to hijack the login page. And if the page that has the link to the page that has the link to the login form... you get the idea. Use SSL on every page, or you lose.
You'd think. But the cheapest interface ICs only deal with the data lines. You have to go to extra effort to control the 5V line.

It isn't trivial. You want to flow 100mA without dropping your 5V source much, because the USB device is still expecting it to be 5V.
It's replaced one small slice of Delicious for me: I no longer tag things 'toRead', I send them to Instapaper instead.
I understand that what Steve Blank (and also Joel in his famous article) refer to is rewrite of existing applications with a lot of customers, something that brings a lot of cash to the company already.

Also, it seems that you describe a rewrite you did by yourself: the dynamics of a rewrite by a single person are quite different I believe, and are more likely to be successful (unless that's one guy who rewrite everything and ask other to support it, which sadly happens too many times).
Alexis got someone to make it for us.
It leaves that "it isn't several hundreds of dollars, since many people who are downloading from PirateBay would not buy the songs even if the free option wouldn't be available." The average person who casually downloads a huge torrent with hundreds of songs would not realistically download all of those songs if they paid $1 each for them. That's not a matter of personality but basic economics -- there's far more demand for a song when the "price" is $0 than when it's $1. For $0, many people will download a given song even if they have no real intention of listening to it, simply because the interface to delete lots of files from your computer is easier than the one to exclude lots of individual items from a torrent download. And hey, you can listen to one or two of them for 15 seconds each, maybe you'll find a new song that you like. The first benefit goes away when you're sticking individual songs in your cart, and the second is not worth very much money at all. Take the option of torrenting away and those people would download only a few of those songs for a much more reasonable amount of money.
As a non-profit, volunteer, open source project, every donation helps, for obvious reasons.

PS, I'm doing my best to fix it, which may mean upgrading my VPS.

EDIT Back up (for now). I'll continue to monitor it.

EDIT2 I'm resizing the VPS right now. Downtime estimate, approx 12 min.

EDIT3 Done resizing, made some config changes. Hopefully it'll withstand things better now.
Macs shipped with GraphicConverter for many years; I'm surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned it.
That reminds me of a saying that we used religiously back in the Navy: "50/50/90".

If you have a 50/50 chance of making a correct decision, you'll get it wrong 90% of the time.
I'd loved to apply and to work there, but somehow I just don't feel "special" enough. I know their languages, I know their infrastructure (well, from GAE xp), I code at work and at home, I meet most of what they say they want in an applicant. There's just something about their persona that makes me think that there is too little of a chance to be picked, too little to even be worth the opportunity cost. It's irrational, I know.
Well speaking as a hardened recessionista the appeal is that I have all my data under my control, where I can easily back it up, am not subject to any whimsical "terms and conditions", and pay ~$0/year in hosting fees. From my point of view spending £80 on a plug computer was one of the best value purchases I've ever made.
i'm in sweden, i can not access it via the market.
Yahoo is really an impression based media company. The number one goal is to drive traffic to properties and monetize it via impressions.

Don't get me wrong -- they've build some impressive technology in house and have/had some bright engineers, but beginning from Filo, Y! was always a media company. The top management continues to drive it in that direction.

As far as properties, Y! Personals was spun off, I believe, and sold to match.com, and that was a pretty profitable business. Y! Real Estate now sells its leads to another company (Trulia?) although when I worked there, they wanted to do something in house.

As content becomes a commodity day by day (via proliferation of blogs, digg-like sites, social media), Yahoo will continue to struggle in a bid to find its relevance.
For Rent: Kennedy Space Center Facilities and Launch Pads
"$1000 to do something awesome": the Toronto Awesome Foundation
Thematically, I am excited about technologies/businesses which shift the balance of power between consumer and large corporation. That the man whose story was reported in the blog entry implicitly was burdened with the requirement to prove he was being cheated is a fundamental problem in his relationship with his "business partner" (a term I chose because each party sells power to the other). How many other common consumer relationships are like this?

I am angered that almost all consumer-grade laptop providers drop driver support only a few months after discontinuing a particular model. There's no easy way to prove that stability issues which crop up later are the result of interaction effects between, say, a Windows 7 update and a particular revision of my video driver. How could someone make HP, etc. accountable? This is merely one example of how consumers are hurt from information asymmetry.

How does one go about auditing his mobile phone bill and ensuring that it actually adheres to the stipulations in his plan "contract" (quotes because there often seems to be no official written statement of terms for a particular plan)?
Show HN: Weekend product coding: Varnish cPanel Plugin
Hi Folks,

If you're a HN regular, I'm afraid this is not your typical "Show HN" entry. It's a software product just not the kind you're accustomed to here. So bear that in mind.

The product is a cPanel plugin written so that anyone could install and manage Varnish from cPanel WHM (vendor: http://www.cpanel.net). From a business plan p.o.v, the goal is to create a new revenue stream to complement our already established fully managed VPS and dedicated server business.

The product has one landing page: http://www.unixy.net/varnish

I'm hoping to get feedback on just about anything and everything regarding this product including the presentation. I promise to gather as much data as possible and present the numbers within a few months.

Facts:

1) Early beta

2) Licensing code piece still being worked on

3) All signups will be processed next week

Cheers!
Don't forget the tangentially-related-through-twitter https://github.com/lg/murder
The real test of this sort of service is how well they manage the reputation of any IPs that are shared between customers.
send me an email, i'll send you a direct link.
I'm trying to get it back up, we just got a huge rush of traffic.
Can someone explain the relationship between Kod and node.js?

The Kod website says it is "based on node.js", but I don't quite get that. I'm familiar with node.js as a server-side platform, but are we about to see a bunch of node.js desktop apps?
You should factor in data transfer cost as well. But for ordinary text-only emails the cost will still be way lower.
Clickable: http://www.unixy.net/varnish
I love this site, thanks for posting this. Added to daily reading.
This is a programmers editor. From the population of people who use such editors, using Linux really isn't all that uncommon.
I recommend Terminus. It's easy on the eyes and looks great in smaller sizes
Really? Because yesterday I went to Meta StackOverflow and was utterly confused why I was getting new openid requests. (It was because MetaSO is different that SO.) Then I went to SO and was still confused because I thought I used yahoo but actually used google. Then, after I logged in with yahoo, I tried to change from google to yahoo and ended up with both, and now I can't remove the google openid. Very confusing.

Instead of managing 1 SO and 1 MetaSO login, I'm managing a connection from SO to one of many providers and MetaSO to one of many providers. Best case, that's 3 pages (SO, MetaSO and Yahoo) to manage logins to 2 sites.
Financial Meltdown Was ‘Avoidable,’ Inquiry Concludes
I can send you an invitation, drop me a line with your github.
> For most users I talk to, an email address (rather than a URL)

Hits nail on head. It's unbelievable how dumb geeks who try to design UX experiences can be (and I say this as one of them). The first day I saw OpenID I was amazed that anybody would try and use a URL as an identifier.

Why would anybody put something that no normal person understands front and center of their UX? This is like opening a shoe shop and putting a quiz about 2nd order differential equations on the front door. Guess what - nobody is going into your store!!!

It was already a huge challenge to get people to understand the concept of using a login from one site to login to another. But it was doomed from the start the minute someone said you should have "http:// in front of your username.
Interesting, but from November 2009.
> Both OS X and WinAPI do this now. Users (in general) hate it

Actually, I rarely see it popping up on OSX so I don't have much of an issue. Win7 on the other hand is downright dreadful: the whole screen flickers (not fades, mind you, you get the impression that the screen just shut down before you see the UAC window pop up) to black (and it manages to lag, which is terrifying), then your content reappears behind a lightbox and you end up with a small UAC window in a random position on one of your n screens (where n > 1 for me), unless somehow an other software has managed to steal focus and then all hell breaks lose (the program which started the UAC prompt will not respond, but I believe it does not focus UAC automatically, so you're left wondering why it's crashed).

And then it manages to not tell you anything useful about why you were prompted. And the window itself sucks: the details are mostly useless (they don't even tell you what the soft is trying to do), there are pointless effects (the zone where you have to enter your password becomes blueish if you hover, half the text of the window changes your mouse pointer to a hand even though they're not clickable, ...) and it pops up every time something tries to fart in Program Files.

OSX at least has the decency to let you drop softs in /Applications without bothering you.
Six years ago my wife and I bought a 90ft tunnel oven to make cookies
In Canada it's commonplace for people to go to a bank and get pre-approved for a mortgage before they go house-hunting, so that they know how much they can afford to spend.

Are things done differently in the US?
As of now, LibreOffice is equal to, if not better, then OpenOffice as it was only forked off of it about 4 months ago. If you're already using OO.o then switching to LibreOffice will be a snap and you won't have to worry about Oracle.
"SQLSTATE[HY000] [1040] Too many connections"

Cant you speak to rackspace to support you?
This analysis completely ignores the cost of time in switching.

For me personally:

SendGrid is completely transparent to my application since it's just an SMTP server.

SES is a web services API, so I need to either (a) rewrite my app to take advantage of it, or (b) write my own SMTP wrapper. Either way, it's code, and I can't imagine ever writing code to save a few dozen dollars per month.

If Amazon offered an SMTP server like SendGrid does, then I could imagine switching, but until then, the monthly savings are negligible.
An iPad App Developer Trying Every Marketing Trick in the Book: Case Study
There are similar outfits in Berlin, Boston, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, NYC, Ottawa, Providence, San Francisco, and Washington DC. The idea is the same in each case: 10 people have committed to contributing $100 per month (maybe it's denominated in pounds or euros in the non-US cities), each month's money to be given to one project deemed to be awesome.

You can read about some of the things funded by the Awesome Foundation at http://awesomefoundation.org/blog/ .

(Why did I link to the Toronto one? One reason only: that's the one I happened to come across first. I guess SF or NYC would be of direct interest to more HN readers. The Boston one was first.)
Last line pretty much sums it up:

"Is html5 the future? I sure hope so!Unfortunately, it isn't the present."
There are offices in virtually every Western European country, and a good number of the Eastern European countries. (Germany has 3-4 good-sized offices.)

Unless you're looking for something very specific?
Well, if commenting is your job then perhaps you should. That is the point being made here I believe.
The referral-based strategy may have limited the user base for a while, but after all the press they've gotten lately, it's certainly no longer working for them. (Besides which, if the goal was to keep using that as a strategy long-term, a more explicit invitation-based system, a la forrst, might have been more sustainable.)

Unfortunately for them, what really attracted people to quora originally was more that the initial users were an interesting group of people, than anything particularly unique that the software was doing. Now that everyone and their dog has an account, the really interesting stuff is rather harder to find, for the moment; their challenge is dealing with that before "no one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
I've used Forrst and really like it.
I wouldn't compare it to your blog any more than any other social site: it's going to enable social interactions + discovery that you wouldn't get on your site... but give you less control. (A fair trade I think. Both have their benefits.)

Like HN, Forrst is full of people who are earnest and invested in their behavior there. It doesn't mean everybody is always right or perfectly behaved, but they are sincere and really care about the topics at hand.
I also like how Forrst users particpate when they have something of value to offer, rather than just to hear themselves type. (that's one thing that bothers me about Quora: people speak up without any really compelling reason to. Compare to HN when most skip threads if we're just going to repeat something.)
Forrst also has excellent design and that permeates the culture and people treat design both as a craft and a technical skill.

The only thing I don't like about Forrst is probably just me: they have some etiquette guidelines i don't totally get. You can show work that's in progress, but i once saw a guy show a fully completed piece of work that a moderator thought was too self-promote-y.
Then I once got modded because I showed some industrial (non digital) design ( because it wasn't graphic, though featured graphic typography on a sign).
It's possible this policy has evolved OR I just didn't read the fine print closely enough, but i felt confused.

I would encourage you to check it out.
It's scriptable via javascript (because people generally get how to script with that) and is using node.js internally to run said javascript.
This Could Be Google’s Design Moment