skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please please please do not make the API dependent on HTTP method verbs. This completely breaks JavaScript apps[1] and it's an arbitrary constraint that does not benefit anything except REST zealotry.

[1] For example, cross-domain JavaScript requests can only read GET responses.
LESS CSS pre-processor in PHP
If you've gotten a computer to, you know, actually get stuff done, why spend any time fiddling with the software and hardware and get stressed out about it?

My business does just that. Then again, we buy from vendors who install and support GNU/Linux. Why compare buying from Apple to building a computer yourself? That's a false dilemma.
I tried it and found it to be extremely over-hyped.
"you can always go back to renting in 5 years"?

You mean sell the house? Fees alone would hammer you pretty hard if the value was flat for 5 years. Selling houses costs a LOT of money. Also, you need a 20% downpayment to dodge mortgage insurance, I think.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...

That gives a pretty clear picture. The moving parts that matter are interest rate, appreciation of the purchased home, and inflation of rent.
That's a great idea. I've been trying to think of better ways to combine the power of 1kbgrid and LESS.
I couldn't read this article because of the stupidly large headshot at the top.
In general, the attacking computer can pretend to have the characteristics of the impersonated computer.
If when = "at what time", then you can't say "Let me know when works for you" because you can't say "Let me know at what time works for you". By saying "when works for you", you're trying to use "when" as a noun phrase. But "when" is not a noun, "time" is.

Would you also use "how" in this way? "Let me know how works for you" instead of "Let me know what way works for you"?
Ahh Qwiki on CNN right now.
Thanks for the info.

I understand and accept that the location is not accurate to the map, but what was so confusing was that the locations didn't seem to be accurate even with respect to other locations, and that the location wasn't deterministic. That doesn't happen on the nytimes example.

If I toggle back and forth between sorting by population and sorting by Rent Price, the bubbles bounce around and end up in... some random arrangement. Sometimes it's reasonable, and sometimes it's bizarre.

Here's a particularly egregious example http://i.imgur.com/ZPAno.png

Los Angeles is SouthEast of San Diego, Oakland is West of San Francisco and San Jose is Northwest of both of them. It's hard for me to avoid being pulled out by that.
Const != immutable. Const in C++ gives you a read-only view into an object. You can accomplish the same goal with more fine-grained control by using interfaces in C# (or Java, which also lacks const). Instead of returning a const reference to your object, you return your object cast to an interface that doesn't have any mutating methods.
Donate $1 to Charity, See 99 Cents Get There
I don't see any reason why analytics should have access to that information when other tracking platforms would not.

Chinese walls should take care of that.

And if those are not in place then google has bigger problems.
The population of Kansas City is 143,000--Kansas City, Kansas, that is. (They're mistakenly using population data for Kansas City, Kansas, instead of the much larger Kansas City, Missouri.)
Your Lying Eyes: The Illusions of Kokichi Sugihara
> People generally prefer flat cost models for simplicity, even when it means they pay more than they would had they paid for each call.

Not just in the tech realm. From the Wikipedia page on the Carte Orange,[0] an institution of the Paris metro for decades that let you ride as much as you wanted for a flat fee:

While transit authorities had estimated that 650,000 Cartes oranges would be sold, within 6 months of its introduction 900,000 were in use.... they assumed that only those public transit users who would save money with the Carte orange would buy one, but this was not to be the case. Many people were attracted to the idea of using Parisian public transports without worrying about tickets or fares, even if it proved to be more expensive.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_orange
How does Dropbox Work?
wow that was sure detailed.

but i'm still not convinced of the steps :)

($=[][(__=!$+$)[_=-~-~-~$]+({}+$)[_/_]+ ($$=($_=!''+$)[_/_]+$_[+[]])])()[__[_/_]+__ [_+~$]+$_[_]+$$](_/_)

here i kept $, only step 11 required [] instead of $

i'm guessing step 14 is actually executed earlier... or that undefined has the same effects as [] for most of those stringfying hacks.
Update: no, undefined trhows an error. so step 14 is earlier... let me replace all that with a eval function that also stores the run order. then i will post the correct ordering.
When your mind wanders, it is dealing with necessary sub-thoght trails, don't abort unless necessary: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-brain-stop-payin...

Learn to have an open mind, but not too open: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-10192149/What-open-m...

Learn about cognitive fallacies and cognitive biases. The little thinking shortcuts minds take which lead to wrong conclusions.

Learn how to learn: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1276882

Start asking smart questions: http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, discover that most of your thinking goes on without you trying at all.

Read "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin DeBecker, our emotional responses to our world can be sources of surprisingly accurate insight.

Develop the ability to create complete silence in your mind, no chit-chatter. Creativity is greater in people with this ability. *scientific american

Learn how to estimate and do it right: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/97805968095...

Becoming a functional perfectionist: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you-be-...

Some of these links are behind pay-walls, sorry, but they are amazing articles, some google searching can get around them.
Sidenote:

If you are not a Ruby guy and want to use LESS without much hassle, try lessphp: https://github.com/leafo/lessphp
You know immediately what "I can haz cheezburger" and "All your base are belong to us" mean. Does it mean they're valid English?
How early should you arrive at the airport?
> I'd suggest to keep working in the U.S. and invest in housing back in Australia.

As it happens I do own a house in Australia that is rented out but when you're paid in one currency and your costs are in another you open yourself up to exchange rate risk. So I'm way of overweighting myself in AUD liabilities. It's not a currency I'd be betting against in the next 10 years. Likewise, the USD looks like it'll only get weaker in the short to medium term. Pretty much every government here has a budget in deficit and you may find local and possibly even state governments defaulting in years to come.

The US governments (at every level) seem to have made the same mistake as many individuals: when times are good they simply increase spending to match or exceed revenue. When revenues drop they're in a bad position. The US has this huge Sword of Damacles hanging over its head in the form of Social Security. It's ultimately unsustainable in its present form. Everyone knows it. Nobody wants to do anything about it.

At least in Australia we've been moving towards funding our own retirements for decades. We're not there yet but we're a damn sight better off.

As for buying houses near the beach, not in any capital city I know about (except maybe Brisbane now). Certainly not Perth or Sydney. In Perth you'd have to go 50km+ north of the city to get anything remotely close to the beach for under $500k.

And the idea that property near the beach "will never go down" is exactly the kind of thinking that led to the subprime meltdown.

As for the Australian tax system, mine was't a criticism, merely an observation. Frankly I think any system that encourages people to create homes for others to rent as doing a public good. After all, when someone rents, somebody else by definition has to own that house.

One other difference worth pointing out between the US and Australia is that in Australia interest rates are typically variable. They move mostly in lockstep with the official (Reserve Bank) cash rate. You do get fixed mortgages but they're rarely for more than 5 years.

In the US, mortgages seem to be fixed for the 30 year life of the loan. This actually makes buying in the short to medium term attractive in the US as interest rates can only really go up. 4% fixed for 30 years is a hell of a deal.
I bet the CR48's arrive before this page actually loads for me
I think his point (and I'm not attempting to dissect the original phrase in question either) might be rooted in some frustration over a perceived decline of the English language.

It does seem as though we have gotten to the point where common usage of a word or phrase often becomes acceptable as correct usage.

An example: Everyone knows what a person means when he says he's nauseous, even the right word was nauseated. It doesn't mean the dictionary should be changed to accommodate that usage, right? I believe at least one American English dictionary now accepts nauseous as a synonym for nauseated. (Yuck)
The work sounds very cool (and they are hiring), but (only) a factor of 4 speedup over Python is (to repeat a phrase from elsewhere today) like boasting that you're the tallest midget ;o)
Thanks - you can pretty much take any class-based grid system and use them this way in LESS (and SASS, of course).

(And if you're rolling your own, you can even be more concise - such as, instead of invoking theWidth() twelve times to build your classes as shown here, make an atGridColumn() function and skip making those classes.)
Nitpick: I thought it didn't work because I was trying Cmd-c/v on my MacBook. I know Macs are the outlier here but it would be nice to use the native shortcuts for this.
Let I know when work for U.

Languages evolve, it's ok.
Or less.js, here: https://github.com/cloudhead/less.js/
Thanks Danilo! I appreciate the kind words.
How to make Mark Zuckerburg's FaceMash with Node.js and Redis
Start-up Profiles: Trunk.ly
Apple Brings The App Store To Twitter Promising Exclusive Offers
Safecracking for the computer scientist
I think there should be a way to disable GET for some commands, this seems to be a serious concern. That said, you'll always be able to access Webdis using GET; you present a common case that justifies the existence of such a feature.

I have started to implement Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, which should enable cross-domain JS requests using POST (If I understood correctly). An OPTIONS call is made by the client before the POST.
The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
Disappearing Jobs: High-Paying Careers with No Future
Hi, article author here.

It's important to note that this particular job is largely bound on a.) I/O and b.) format serialization tasks. Both Python's BSON and JSON libraries are mature and have their critical sections written in C, so a speedup of 4x is still noteworthy. The Haskell version, on the other hand, is pure Haskell.
A little more about the movie:
"The biggest surprise for me in the making of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was that we actually got brands and companies to not only agree to be in the film, but to actually pay for it."

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/01/the-greatest-m...
Microsoft’s marketing plan for tablets shows they’ve already lost
Well, you can argue that English *devolves*.

I'm writing that down as a quote.
Wall Street's new lie: Asset allocation
It just arrived!
Are you talking a modern condo? If so I believe it. If not, you can find places for cheaper than that. Put it this way last month I rented a 1BR in a Chelsea brownstone for $2,000/month (which is generally more expensive than Midtown).

But think about those numbers for a second. $2500/month is $30,000pa or a 3% gross return, even less once you factor in maintenance. To put that in perspective, 5% gross return seems to be the benchmark in Australia (although in Australia there tends to be a tradeoff between capital growth and annual income).

In London I've seen the gross return be 10% or even higher.

So who would invest $1 million for a <2% gross return? That's nothing but a bet on future capital gains. In other words it's speculative. So the question is: is that sustainable (meaning will rents go up to match) or unsustainable (meaning prices will stagnate or go down)?

On a side note, some may consider it strange that I'm talking about the rent figure as a return. I've certainly spoken to many people who can't look past the speculation but that income is really important as it does relate to the asset price. They simply can't get too far out of whack sustainably.

Commercial or industrial property tends to be judged much more on viewing the property as an asset that generates income (Las Vegas casinos notwithstanding).
I see it as a visualization of where "old money" has gobbled up the realestate.
Umm, it's pretty trivial to click "Accept/Decline/Propose new Time" in Outlook. Gmail seems to do the needful for Outlook appointments that get sent to Gmail addresses. So no sweat there either.

I see absolutely no problem in going back and forth a couple of times before settling on the time.

Btw, I personally always give people a list of times instead of saying "whatever".
(DISCLAIMER: my startup) I'd also recommend checking out http://www.wishpot.com/ if you're interested in a universal wedding registry and wishlist.

Also, to any hackers in Seattle with an interest in this space who does Ruby or .NET Development, we're hiring - please contact me! Tom at Wishpot.com
Except that he's simply saying this is part of "don't be evil", not that because of this, Google are 100% non-evil.
wow! Very nicely done. Intuitive, simple, and it works flawlessly.
Wonderful comment.
One of the reasons there has been a huge influx of funding is that there was A LOT of sideline cash in 2008. A lot of the fear has since evaporated, and funding and liquidity has increased, albeit, with some pent up back pressure.
Nice. Feedback (Chrome 10 dev, Win7):

- text area and input don't take my text - are they meant too?

- is the textlink URL thing editable to make a link?

- Imagebox would be nice

- An editable example page showing off most features would be good, i.e. show a completed wireframe that people can learn from.

Good luck!
Protip: ignoring examples of terms with unintentionally racist overtones and telling people not to bring it is often a characteristic of somebody with unexamined privilege and lack of understanding of racism.

If you don't want people to think of you that way, avoid doing it. And when somebody else does, don't upvote them.

EDIT: downvoted. What a surprise. People here sure don't like getting called on their privilege.
I'm quite surprised by this. I live in the Seattle area, and there are more dev jobs than developers... everyone company/team I know that looks for a developer has a problem doing so... positions sit unfilled for months.

I should emphasize, there are definitely a lot of developers here, but the amount of _good_ developers is less than the amount of jobs looking for them. I have three times in the past two years been the primary resource (interviewer/researcher) for finding new developers, and each time I find 90-100% of the devs I interviewed were just trash. I lucked out one of those three times and found an outstanding one, but the other two times I had to settle on a less than ideal one.

I'd also say that networking plays a huge part... join groups with similar programming interests (such as .Net user group or Alt.Net), post on Facebook that you're seeking a gig, etc... that will you help you get through the pile of devs that are simply developing for the money, not for the love of development.
"GDP is projected to be flat."

This is utterly absurd and shows a complete misunderstanding of economic growth.
How long will it take to access those reserves? My wag would be a decade.
Good points. It's hard to say what specific factors are driving the substantial influx in capital. However, I agree with the comment about investment alternatives. Where else can you invest today and expect a significant return? On this point, there might be a bit of resulting froth in the angel and venture capital markets, but I don't think this reflects an industry-wide bubble as what we witnessed in 2000.

Take Facebook as an example. Is Facebook worth $50b, per the recent Goldman Sachs investment? It's possibly worth much more, if we assume that Facebook is the winner-take-all in a network market (social networking). Are there significant uncertainties related to Facebook's revenue model and the company's ability to fend off substitution threats? Yes. But this is consistent with the risk/reward profile that comes with an equity investment in a privately held, high-growth tech company.
Mapper.js – Automatic Area Highlighting to Image Maps
mapper.js allows you to add automatic area highlighting to image maps on your webpages (inc. export to SVG).
Now that you've built in the live editor, there are just a few more steps that I would do.

1: Create a free option. 1 page, include email optin, limited to 2-500 views/month
2: If you're not hosting these pages and allowing them to be called from your server via js, start doing that
3: Advertise the free option along with the other two. Tons of research has shown that given 3 options, users will tend toward the middle option, even if it paid and there is a free option available
4: Include more info. Build a new page for the "Plans and Pricing" include the "Go Back" link, but also include more info on how it's hosted, how easy it is to use the service, and any other relevant details
Looking at the google cache shows that this is the source for the article: http://twitter.com/LuigiMontanez/status/29625344294133760#
Sounds great. I'm a very big Haskell fan.

I'd love to point people to this when trying to convey some advantages of Haskell. To make it more compelling, can you expand some on the downsides and maybe obstacles you encountered?

The thing I'm unsure about, is how difficult it would be for (very) talented developers to just jump in. We have really talented developers, and everyone is super time-constrained, so many are wary of diving into a language as different as Haskell. Was it hard for your developers to figure Haskell out? Did your previous use of Scala help? How long did it take them to dive into Scala?
If the word "Dark" invokes a racist meaning for somebody else, you might consider trying to understand why rather than attacking them. It's quite possible that ''you'' are the one who's on a fast track to being racist.
Neat - thanks.
A gallery of viruses
Ask HN: Best way to accept weekly subscriptions?
Hello HNers, I need your help...

Trying to find the best way to accept weekly subscriptions on our site. Here's the use case. We want subscriptions to start on the same day for everyone, so when people first subscribe, we charge them a prorated amount for the first week, then a regular X dollars/week rate.

We're using PayPal right now. I've recently discovered that for people who sign up using their Paypal account instead of their credit card, we cannot change their subscriptions by more than 20% every 180 days. This is unacceptable for us as we'll need to cancel their current subscription and create a new one, instead of just edit their current subscription profile. I also don't like PayPal in general and want to move away from it asap.

We've checked out Braintree after a few people recommended it. However Braintree's recurring billing doesn't support anything less than 1 month billing period. So we'd have to manually run our subscription charge ourselves. We want to avoid that if possible, don't have too much spare time to monitor that stuffs.

Anyone else you would highly recommend? I haven't used Authorize.net, and am a bit scared of their confusing website...
Principal repayment is a savings account if and only if real estate never declines in value.
I would guess things have changed a little with the newest technology?

The correct answer might now be "not with the naked human eye" (through an optical telescope).

It is only recently possible to correct atmospheric distortion by having a computer project a laser through the atmosphere and measure the change in realtime and adapt for it (adaptive optics).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laser_Towards_Milky_Ways_C...

Also, the increase in CCD densities have become enormous in the past few years. So it might be possible to make a matrix that could resolve the flag in the near future.

The stereo telescope method they mention at the end has also been improved recently if I remember reading correctly and they have robotic telescopes that can pull this off.

ps. the James Webb Telescope that's going up in 2014 will have 6 times the collection area of the Hubble, so maybe that will be able to do it ! It looks like it's right out of Star Trek:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:JWST_people.jpg
I always like to read about things like this -- but if they think 1MM pages at 25gigs and 0.8 requests/sec is a lot then I can't wait for their service to get more popular. It's similar to someone saying they have a huge database with only a few million rows in it. They do have a good site design though. I wish them the best of luck. It only gets more fun from there. :)
Ask HN: What do you use for cloud based storage?
I'm looking for a good way to move common resources online. Things such as templates, books, toolkits, etc. Anything I might use at home, at work, and maybe a coffeeshop?

Just curious what people use and the tools (plugins?) they use for them. Examples I've heard of/used are Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Docs.
Mark, thanks for the feedback. I think you raise a fair point. We always have a little bit of a balancing act with "headline" communications (i.e., introductory/"hook" content as opposed to pages deep on our site). No headline/chart can capture everything we're trying to say (and not say) while still being simple and intuitive. We're always discussing the tradeoffs and would be happy to speak further with you; I'll shoot you an email.
Audio and Video processing in HTML5, revelations of modern browsers
Bare licenses (e.g., a license that is not really a contract) are revokable. If Groklaw and Moblen are right, the copyright owner of GPLv2 code can un-GPL the code. This is covered in Rosen's book on open source licensing, and is one of the reasons he recommends making sure your software licenses are in fact contracts.
Weather on your mobile phone (I want this with more query types)
agreed, all qwiki does is read out loud articles word for word from wikipedia. it also jacks the images.
useless.
Having just moved to KCMO, I was very confused by this though happy that I'm renting
IQ test to assess and outsmart bacteria's 'social intelligence'
Anaphoric macros
Well, obviously we want some copy (hopefully, the best copy) of the file to be available at its original name without having to use a Dropbox client or visit the Dropbox website. So I guess what you're looking for is an additional interface (website or client) which would allow easy choosing or even diffing following a conflict? I'd certainly support that, as I've had to diff myself in the past.
Are you figures in real terms or nominal terms? If nominal, then sentences like "where once you could build a house for $80k, now anything less than $150-200k is unrealistic" are unsuitable for building an argument upon.