skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is anecdotal, but my experience is that the limiting factor for most readers is just having a book to read. If I have a book with me that I really want to read, time magically appears to read it — books fit very well into those little gaps that are otherwise wasted. But I don't have time to think about reading, so if I don't have that book with me, I'm not going to look for one. The easy availability combined with guilt-free impulse-buy prices on ebooks solves that.

Extra anecdote: My girlfriend has always been an avid reader, but since she got a Nook, I'd estimate her book purchases have doubled because she can just buy a book at midnight while she's sitting in bed or when she's stuck home sick or on her lunch break.
New hacker space in NYC will have community and classes
There is actually a company that does this. But since Amazon doesn't do OAuth, they require you to give them your amazon login and password. They download your account usage logs from amazon and put a GUI over it. The password requirement was a showstopper for me so I didn't even try the co. The graphs sure looked pretty. :)

Sorry, the name of the company escapes me ATM.
I haven't used any from the HN resources page, but this one is pretty good so far. Thanks!
Backbone.js is really cool sounding, but is there a really easy way to add persistence? (CouchDB/MongoDB/something else?)
Automatically build emacs from source every night
Not quite. There was the rewrite that killed the company, and then there was another rewrite, which turned into Firefox.
> I don't think it's really the technical details of the typography that are at the root of my loathing.

> The annoying part is that it looks unprofessional, and out of place.

I submit that the reason behind sentence two are the technical details mentioned in sentence one.
We need a serious critique of net activism
You claim to be shooting for 500,000 videos in the next couple of years. There's no way that each cost hundreds of dollars (just $100 would make it $50M) and are all expertly made / edited.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/25/...

"The goal this year is to start creating (from scratch) 2,500 original videos per week in 4 studios at Mahalo's L.A. headquarters. And Calacanis says the goal over the next couple of years is to reach 500,000 original videos."

That's 625 "professional" videos per studio per week. Sorry Jason, I don't buy it.
I keep meaning to go and have a look (I'm local, although trapped in Fife lately). Not that there'd be much to see, really.
Cool, thanks. Yes I know there are other android clients, but the ones I found on the Market had lots of reviews saying that login, voting, and commenting were missing (and I wanted a layout more similar to the website). So I wrote my own client as an exercise and decided to publish it.
Why? My theory is just that browsers are developed primarily for English, and that both Safari and Chrome put the close-tab buttons on the same side as the close-windows buttons for their respective primary operating system. Chrome in Arabic was developed as an afterthought, and it was just easier to flip the whole UI around.
I'm pretty sure that if you downloaded your usage logs, you would know exactly how the money was spent (it's tedious, though). Link posted by frisco above: http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index....
As I read it, he had to sacrifice a lot of features (tags, archives, related posts) to gain... what exactly?
Every time he publishes a post he has to generate all of the pages again (because of the "recent post" links, etc.), which takes 6 minutes. With WordPress (et al.) it takes a few seconds.

I am not against Jekyll. It sounds like a cool project. But I'm just curious if moving from WordPress to Jekyll really is worth doing, even if you're a developer/geek and like to tinker with software.

If you need to do it for speed, consider using Varnish to cache most everything. Items you cache will probably be at least as fast to serve as static html.

(Btw. this reminds me of craigslist way of publishing entries).
I haven't seen one, but it could be a fairly nice weekend project. Use a couple of hacks[1] to get the fonts, compare that with a list of font uses, and ask the user:

What's the emotion to be conveyed?
Where's it used? (Heading, wherever)

Then, display the top font, and a visual list of choices. I suppose that one could also link to free OSS fonts as well, but that would likely have to be second-tier compared to using what's on the computer already.

1. http://www.lalit.org/lab/javascript-css-font-detect
From that link:

HMAC(K,m) = H((K ⊕ opad) ∥ H((K ⊕ ipad) ∥ m)).
Google snags Twitter movie recommender Fflick for $10M
For anybody who was doing extensive reading off the screen around that time, Verdana was a blessing. Pages set in Verdana were often markedly more legible than their counterparts. "Boring" wasn't a factor. Eyestrain was.

A lot of people still get this wrong. I have several bookmarklets in the browser toolbar to whack bad font choices (as well, color choices and leading) on pages I'm interested in actually, you know, reading.

In this sense, Verdana deserves the kudos. As well, MS, for making it freely available. (I didn't even read about any chairs being thrown.)

P.S. I like its contemporary sibling, Georgia, as well. Similar design goals, in a serif format.

Here's one article I seem to recall from several years ago, though I haven't reread the whole thing just now:

http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm
Is that people who join a beta? Or is that people who sign up to be notified of when the beta opens up (as is our case)?
(Preface: I pretty much know nothing about stock markets and trading.)

Isn't there a whole industry that revolves around paying people to provide you with their trading strategies? How is that considerably different than what's happening on Collective2?

Having a good strategy doesn't mean you have the money to actually trade on it. Or that you can slowly build up your trading bankroll using the same strategy.

Then there's strategies that only yield modest returns. Why not make some money on top of that by renting it out? If you let a dozen people use your strategy, does acting on that information give you much of an advantage? I would guess that depends on how much money those people are trading on your strategy.

I would also guess there aren't many big players renting strategies on Collective2. It's an interesting concept and I think the fact that they've been active since 2003, somewhat validates the idea.

The best thing about it seems to be the ease of using an automated trading agent. I don't know how easy it is to do that elsewhere, but one reason to put your strategy on Collective2 (I'm guessing you can keep it private) would be to use their automation facilities.
Neither the paper I linked to nor the paper written buy the Princeton guys shows that equities markets are NP complete. They both show that markets in certain derivatives are NP complete.

However, I made a mistake and linked to the wrong paper. Here is the correct one:

http://dpennock.com/papers/fortnow-dss-2004-compound-markets...

Basically, the result says that if you have a market in derivatives which pays off when certain formulas in propositional logic are true (e.g., a derivative which pays off if A && (!B || C) is true, for specific events A,B,C), then the auctioneer's matching problem is NP complete. The auctioneer's matching problem is simply market making, and if the market were efficient, this problem would already be solved (by looking at prices).

I don't think that loewenskind's claim is true, for the most part, I was just providing a more detailed source on NP completeness of some markets.
> unless you are an experienced designer, you are much better off picking a standard classic font, such as Helvetica

I'll definitely be making a similar recommendation in my book. Thanks for reading.
Why the Long Lost Google Book Pact Still Matters
He's so lame. Long live The Scene. We pre, we will pre.
Kidnapper ransoms son-in-law for Xbox 360
Scott Heiferman looks back at Meetup's bet-the-company moment
Pixelmator Grosses $1 Million on the Mac App Store
The Cowardly Lion’s Guide to Conquering Your Entrepreneurial Fears
If I recall correctly the free tier enables you to use one micro EC2 instance. $60 for a month sounds about the cost of a small EC2 instance.
’It's About Us, John'
Was it successful for Netscape the company, or for the eventual users (MANY years later) of Firefox? I agree with you on the latter, but the decision makers at Netscape need[ed] to be concerned about the former.
Another fun trick with jekyll is to use sinatra to let you host it on Heroku. :) Their varnish will make your blog get hosted at lightning speed, and it's free.
The company that I'm working for (a great, quickly expanding startup) is looking for mobile devs, if you're interested shoot me an email and I can provide further details.
Built something to scratch his own itch, turned it into a ubiquitous service and still a one-man-shop. What is there not to like?

This:

[...] geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting, or because they can add massive value if done well [...] These features — often very easy for people but very hard for computers — often produce mediocre-at-best results, are never truly finished, and usually require massive time investments to achieve incremental progress with diminishing returns.

I've come to believe that the number one thing a user cares about is a smooth, obvious and consistent workflow, and if you are not giving them that, you shouldn't be working on anything else.
My BofA PIN is 6 digits, so you'd need to hash a million values.

Still a pretty small rainbow table, I guess.
Ask HN: Please review my new web-app
Hello all

I just launched my new uber-simple fun web-app: http://twitgrade.com/

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated...
I used Blosxom for several years, which is a Perl blogging system with a similar minimalist approach to blogging, and includes a static method of site generation so you can use it in the same way.

I switched off of it because WordPress has a lot more templates available, and my web design skills just aren't that great. But, I often think I'd like to give it another go. It is more fun to write in vim than a web based editor.
"Every Monday morning [Jobs] brings them together to review products and the challenges of designing and executing them... Four hours a week, fifty weeks a year, for twelve years equals 2,400 hours spent building mental and relationship capital by connecting the newest ideas of diverse brilliant and passionate minds."

I've been told before success is simple: you focus and you be patient. So yes, you too can be an "overnight" success lauded and dissected by millions around the world when you spend your whole life on it.

See also Michael Jordan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBxcunGc_nA
The Science Behind Good Presentations
thank god. this was one of the missing features that currently helps keep me tied to firefox.
Mahalo 4.0 is great! Please send my ticket to ... ;-)
Wow it's even more trivial than Twitter
Because it's so close to Earth, the drag force will be much greater than any propulsion force achieved from solar particles, which means its orbit will decay and it will fall out of orbit. However, this doesn't preclude it from being a solar sail, it just means it's not a very efficient sail. Eventually, we'd like to send these into deep space, where there is no drag from the atmosphere, allowing the craft to accelerate indefinitely. But for now, it makes sense to keep it in orbit and study it at close range so we can be sure the "sail" effect works as predicted.

More info: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/smallsats/10-109.html

"The relatively low-deployment altitude means drag from Earth's atmosphere may dominate any propulsive power it gains from the sun, but the project represents a small first step toward eventually deploying solar sails at much higher altitudes... because the sail will deploy relatively close to Earth, researchers will have a difficult time detecting the slight solar effects."
Isn't one the advantages of multi-core processors reduced power consumption? (especially important in mobile devices)

Not to mention manufacturing costs, cache coherency, reduced PCB complexity? I don't really see this as an advantage, more isn't always better.
Umm .. that's why!
Do you find the self-service checkouts to be faster?

Even now I've got past the "unidentified item in the bagging area" stage, it's still slower than having them swipe them through for you ...
There is no system.
Does anyone recommends a self-hosted webapp to manage and send the newsletters through AES/SendGrid/etc?

I would love to use mailchimp or campaignmonitor, but I only have users, not customers, and the high price ins't justified.
Maybe it's just me, but working 24-7 and keeping a sleeping bag at your desk sounds like a really easy way of burning out quickly.
http://99designs.com/ is one of the big ones.

http://www.crowdspring.com/ is another.

There are more listed if you use a google search like this:
related:99designs.com/ 99 designs
I initially rolled my eyes at the rant, but he does make some good points.

I've never thought about it before, but a bank really has to reason no send your pin number to you in print, or store it in a form that they could access.

Or do they?
Is the era of the public company coming to an end?
Why User Interface Design is So Important
I've been using something very similar for my blog for the past month or so, it's called Toto. Flat file, git, Ruby, Markdown, Disqus, etc. Check it out: http://cloudhead.io/toto
and a good post on how to get up and running http://fadeyev.net/2010/05/10/getting-started-with-toto/ . It was really fast and simple to go from 0 to blogging. The default template is nice too (jlank.com)
Police States And Criminal Armies
Four views of statistics: Frequentist, Bayesian, Likelihood, Info-Theoretic
> I wonder how resistant a 10m^2 piece of thin polymer sheet would be to a lazy 2-inch screw hurtling into it?

Presumably, not resistant at all... Even the heavy shielding on the ISS can only protect from debris less than 1cm in diameter. The question is, would such a debris hit shred the sail, or would it punch a neat hole, leaving it mostly intact?
In many periods of history (including a chunk of the 20 years of the Old West), it was up to individual members of the community to deal with the really bad guys. Killing them was the method. Holding people from historical eras (even the fiction of that era) to modern conventions / beliefs kinda defeats the purpose.

Have you actually watched any of the John Wayne flicks? The motivation is pretty self explanatory. Its like asking why the military in ID4 wants to kill the aliens. Getting shot at first is generally considered a basic reason.
I would love it if you could provide a link to your cheaper for more service providers. I've not found anything comparable for less $. Also, if you're comparing lock-in prices, compare them against the EC2 reserved instance prices.
CSS3 Transforms, Transitions, and Animations in Action
What if VisualStudio had achievements?
The holy grail, as seen in Halting State, is to procedurally generate all the missions, so you get something like:

SMS text to player 1:
Go to place X at midday, write code 12345 on the ground in chalk.

SMS text to player 2:
Go to place X at midday + 10 minutes, reply by SMS with the code you find.

If you have sufficient density of spies, arranging that kind of interaction should be fairly easy. On the other hand, everyone that doesn't live in a large city with an active population in the game is going to have a more abstract experience - no finding secret messages other people have left!
Hi. I've never seen mahalo.com before nor have I commented on it. What I wrote down was my first impression as a user.

Also note that I pointed out the positive: "They have a video which is pretty good." But all the auto-generated stuff surrounding it is noise to me.

Best of luck with mahalo.com.
His real problem seems to be they sent him his PIN when he didn't ask for it.

As for sending the PIN in the mail, sometimes people forget their PIN. He lists three forms of communication he claims are more secure: voice, fax & inbox on the https site. Banks can more easily verify the mailing address because it's easier. At least with that you've got a mailman checking that the name matches the address. I realize that's not foolproof, but what is? It's easier than trying to verify a phone or fax number actually belongs to the right person. And with https, not everyone owns a computer, but it's rare for a bank opening an account for someone without a fixed address. Even when account statements are sent to a P.O. Box, they generally ask for a physical address for their records.

All three can be secure if there's proper authentification, but again, if he didn't need or ask for it in the first place then that's the real problem.

Edit: another problem with voice is the the bank employee on the other end of the line has to be able to see the plaintext PIN to speak it. Banks I have worked at strictly limited the number of people with access to that info, you couldn't just walk up to a teller and have them look up your PIN, for example.
Cool, I'm using it to write this. Seems to work well enough. I wish there was a light theme, as I'm not really a fan of the light grey on black. Also,the voting doesn't seem to work correctly. I voted up this story, then quit the app and re-launched it, and it said I hadn't voted. Trying to vote it up again though failed, as the vote had indeed gone through.
What about man in the middle?(Go to yahoo get your image and display it for you.) Heck even pass your credentials through to yahoo to verify that you gave me the correct credentials.
This looks great. I'm helping a friend with a site where this would be perfect for improving his conversions without as much work on my part.

One question though. Do the visitors get a cookie to maintain the split on return visits?
Upload & Crop Image With PHP & jQuery
Yes, backbone-couchdb.js

Annotated source: http://janmonschke.github.com/backbone-couchdb/backbone-couc...

Article: http://janmonschke.posterous.com/backbone-couchdb-give-your-...
Good example of effective marketing. They give you a free, useful plugin, but related plugins are available for a substantial fee. Given that you have to sign up to download the free plugin, they also have a way to propose an upsell in the future (I pretty much expect emails from them).
Google IO 2011 - Site open - Registrations start 02/07/2011
Why haven't more people migrated to WebFinger for identity?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_enables_webfinge...

It uses your email address, and seems to offer a good way to get access to an OpenID-like sign in (maybe this is using OpenID or OAuth under the covers?)
Yeah, the Stop & Shop tie-in here in CT works just fine. They even use the same weekly discounts as the real supermarket. I couldn't drive for a bit after an accident and it was invaluable to me. Amazon shouldn't even bother trying to compete here.
Like Ping! Oh wait...
Yes, 'not' is how I would have described the resistance. As long as it were a fairly direct hit, I imagine a neat hole would be most likely (though these could add up fairly quickly over time).
> How are normal people supposed to be able to tell that a font like Georgia is also much friendlier than the angular and rickety Times New Roman while at the same time being entirely appropriate for nearly every imaginable formal setting (unlike Comic Sans)?

True story:

I call a designer friend of mine, and start to ask him, "I'm making a new website, and I was wondering what font would---"

He interrupts -- "Georgia."

Me: "I didn't tell you anything about the site yet."

Him: "Doesn't matter. Choose Georgia. You win."

I did. Later, a different designer friend of mine was emailing me, and writes in the PS, "By the way, I'm always thinking about beautiful the font on your site is, and then I realize it's Georgia. Ahhh, Georgia."

I laughed. Georgia for the win.
Leverage Microsoft's WCF web-services with Dojo's JavaScript framework
Liking the UI updates from the previous version. Would be nice to be able to change the default tap action.
This is apparently their reaction to this support ticket - http://answers.37signals.com/basecamp/4899-openid-having-iss... - in which they say "Something changed with the MyOpenID provider recently and we're tracking the issue as we look for a fix."
Nice sales reports, although I have to feel it has something to do with them including the upcoming 2.0 release and no way for current users to upgrade to the Mac App Store.
OAuth Will Murder Your Children
I don't think it's necessarily hated by all designers either. As I understand it, a good designer has many arrows in their quiver and uses them accordingly. In my very limited design research, I got the impression that Comic Sans could give an informal look that Helvetica would be hard-pressed to duplicate.

As far as I can see, this article would like "programming for designers: why you hate Visual Basic For Applications".

Of course, me not being a developer, there's a chance that he-who-speaks-for-all-developers will step in and slap me down.
Also why real companies need to be much better about not ignoring them on poorly written https pages that refer to http assets.
I think Zed Shaw is on this for some time.

http://autho.me/
That was just the latest in a long string of issues with OpenID. Hardly the sole reason.
I love these stories. Must feel great to have a real impact on real customers. Keep it up!
I didn't say it is FOR GOOGLE. I said that the page contains numerous boxes which are search results from {Google, Bing, Twitter}, which IMO don't add much value to the topic.

For example:

http://sp.life123.com/bm.pix/fractions2.s600x600.jpg

or:

"@wyrdgirl_aj gurl ima call u after this 930 class... We learnin how to convert fractions to % -_- #bored
from @QueenofKings16"

Best of luck with the new mahalo.com.
Oh come on. The standard "if it's so easy why don't you just build it yourself and open-source it" is a meaningless reply. There are tons of things in the world that are pretty easy to implement if you are provided the supporting systems and environment. If I had already put in the tons of hard work to build an email client I would write the threading piece the way I suggested above. But I haven't.

My point above is that the algorithm probably isn't terribly difficult for someone to implement. I don't think the fact that I will never implement an email threading algorithm precludes me from making that assessment.

The algorithm may be more complicated. It may not be. I doubt that it is significantly more complicated. I certainly wouldn't bet my first born on it, but then I doubt that you actually would either.
Things Not To Do With Your Web Marketing
Wind and the sand
Maybe just people forgetting which OpenID login they used.
Agreed. Rapidly chewing through prototypes in the early stages of a project is a great way to weed out bad ideas.

Rewriting stable production code, on the other hand, is almost always a mistake.
Instead of How To Pages they're going to concentrate on How To Videos. Not all that much of a pivot IMHO.

Pros:

+ It should be more popular than user-generated content of the same type (overall).

+ Very few other companies would be willing to invest as much time and money into competing. How To pages are much much cheaper.

+ High CPMs if they can build a trusted brand with quality viewership.

+ There's less competition for video content than text content, and it's harder to steal (no synonym substitutions, etc).

Cons:

+ Hugely expensive. Low profit margins.

+ Very slow to generate.

+ Far less video views than page views (less ad impressions). Many on YouTube itself.

+ Hard to manage and keep quality at large scale.

+ Very small buyer market for high CPM video ads. Low click through.