skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Until Google gets its act together, here's a quick way WE can improve search
I was prompted to submit this entry to HN after reading this post: http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/12/google-search/

I've been doing what I describe below for a while and can't imagine living without it. I think with a bit of collaboration everyone can benefit and make Google suck less.

Install this Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/eidhkmnbiahhgbgpjpiimdogfidfikgf

And add this to the config:

# Make these domains stand out in results

+en.wikipedia.org

+stackoverflow.com

+github.com

+api.rubyonrails.org

+apple.com

+ruby-doc.org

+codex.wordpress.org

+imdb.com

+alternativeto.net

+superuser.com

+news.ycombinator.com

+.edu/

# SPAM - never show these results

experts-exchange.com

ezinearticles

efreedom.com

about.com

ehow.com

I'm hoping someone can compile a more complete list of the content farms so that I can improve my config (and therefore my search experience). Just adding the major ones (Experts Exchange, etc) as above already makes a huge difference. Could someone maybe post a gist on GitHub with a more complete config?
Apple bringing Photo Booth to iOS devices
How about:

@(show.Slug+".mp3")

I think you need brackets to tell the parser when the code ends if you're building expressions.
I think yield's coming to ECMAScript Harmony. That should simplify things a lot.
Does anybody really believe startups are easy? When I talk with people, I always make it a point to say "startups are _hard_" -- and everybody nods in agreement.
Like either of those would be massively revolutionary either.
When to use Vanilla Javascript vs. jQuery?
“Android is a global phenomenon,” he says. “The big deal is, Android is free software, and handsets that can run it are getting super-cheap. So we are going to see a massive shift from 'dumb phones' to 'smart phones' around the world this year, and iPhone will not be the big beneficiary of that trend.”

Hmmm, not sure how you can argue against that. Unless Apple comes out with a cheaper version iPhone.
From a slightly over-structured perspective, you can think of pricing strategy in one of three ways: cost+, value to customer, or competitive benchmarking (market). You can probably figure out the meaning of all three but in case not:

Cost plus is simple in that you calculate how much it cost you to make something and then charge more than that per unit, ideally with a margin you are happy with. Not too applicable to this situation, but if you want to think about it, take your hourly salary * # hours you spent on this for total cost. Figure out how many downloads you can realistically get at some price and then you go from there (hint, 99c is probably ok from this perspective).

Customer value pricing is much more of a nebulous science. Basically, you try to figure out how much value people attach to certain product characteristics or functionalities. In reality, you can observe customers, interview/survey them and do other experiments. From a more basic perspective ask yourself this: how big of a problem does my product solve and how important is that problem? The QuickOffice app solves a huge problem for me (I can't get my computer files or edit them on my iphone)and so I paid $9.99 for it. Angry birds solves a smaller problem (I'm bored for a few minutes) so I only pay 99c for it. How do you know how big of a problem you are solving? Ask yourself what a user would do if they didn't have your product: without QuickOffice, I would have to drive back to my house and get my laptop. With Angry Birds, I just read the news for a few minutes instead. With your app, I could foresee the problem being solved by manually entering the movie title.

For iPhone apps, competitive benchmarking is most important. Really, unless your app does something extraordinary, it should be 99c or free. However, in your case, I assume you might be doing doing this in order to learn. You will learn more if you get more downloads, and therefore more user data/feedback. Therefore, there may be greater value for you would be to put it out there for free. Use the experience and insights you gain from this to build something even better in the coming months/years.
I've always found there are two types of employees.

Employees who do the tasks in their realm of their responsibility and that's it. I think that's fine. In a company, you need employees who reliably work in their realm.

There are also the "entreprenurial" employees who want to create value in the company and go above and beyond.

I think you need both.
What are ways in which a website makes money?
like advertizing is one.
how about a website which allows you to use its application?
3 Reasons Quora Is Owning Right Now
Been waiting your whole life to break that one out, haven't you? If that doesn't deserve an upvote I don't know what does.
I'm a little surprised such rudimentary math made it to the front page of Hacker News (at #2 even). Maybe it's time to pick a FP language and make posts about it all day, to scare some people away?
tried the service. The UI is great. Content is decent.

But I prefer using unmoderated google video search. Why do I need to tag, when I can just add it as a search term.

I also prefer being able to scan the small image icons.

But I think google video search is how nerds find porn. We can domain deep search certain sites, if necessary (pun intended). Your site may have greater appeal with a wider audience.
It was tougher than the "fast food" we're all used to reading these days, but then, so was Shakespeare. I'm not saying this article was worthy of the Bard, but I am saying there is something to be said for packing a lot of meaning into a few words. "Julius Caesar betrayed by closest advisor" may be the kind of synopsis we're used to reading but I for one appreciated the subtle undertones in this article like "Azure economy" and "collapse of trust messaging".

That said, I strongly dislike the way Apple has tried to blackball Flash, can't say I'm sorry to see Google push back a little on Adobe's behalf (though of course they're doing it for their own interests, as the article states).
egad - please take a 100 upvotes from me. I have actually offered to pay money (it's on a bug somewhere on launchpad) for the suspend/hibernate issues.

I'm not sure if Fedora fixes this, but if yes - I'm all over it. I'm HATING have to shutdown and restart.
Related, Gruber's rebuttal:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2102659
I'd rather have 10% of $10 million in sales, than 100% of $500k in sales.
Subscribe to Parts of HTML Pages with Superfeedr Fragments
I'm a fellow autodidact, have been for six years - pursuing my own liberal curriculum and technical specializations. I'd be interested in having a chat over email about your curriculum and the other things I don't get to talk about with other people because I don't have any kin on the same path! (you're the first I've found that also openly referred to themselves as an autodidact!)

ixmatus at [google's mail]
Ask HN: How do you explain something complex in simple terms?
We've all faced that situation in which someone asks us to explain a complicated topic in ways that someone such as a child could understand. What is the magical recipe for doing that? Imagine this as an interview question: finding a general method or set of steps to simplify material in a way that doesn't lose the core ideas. Even better, find a way to simplify it into the fewest number of words.

How would you answer this question?
It isn't sensible to think that any system can eliminate fraud entirely. If you want a system that gets it right most of the time then you can look to ebay.
Interesting question, one that'll likely be debated forever.

Regarding this - I see most people falling into one of two camps: (1) Trusting of people from the onset and slowly build walls due to bad circumstances, or (2) Walls pre-built and people need to break them down in order to "get in".

#1 will likely share their ideas freely
#2 will likely not
(there are always exeptions...)

What camp do you lean towards? My recommendation is that you try a little of the opposite... In my opinion, this is based around a fairly core trait...trust. You are who you are, and it's not easy to change a core trait like that. However, you can shift a bit and not make yourself uncomfortable.

It's probably been said a billion times, but ideas are nothing...action is everything. If you're not taking action yourself, and you need others to help...keeping that idea to yourself isn't going to get you any further.

That's really the bottom line.

Find the right people you can trust and talk to them. At some point, you do have to open up and share.

By the way, guilty as charged in the past. I've shifted, and am much happier for it.

Cheers,
AL
China's secret space fighter plane
Persistence allows luck a chance to happen.

I'm a strong beliver, having spent a lot of time consulting with various companies, that most of them become successful because they get lucky at some point in their history.

I've rarely seen or worked with perfect companies that have smart leaders and ideas that area too good not to succeed. However, what I have found common is these successful companies usually spent a long time (>5 years) not being successful until one day they land their whale, great PR/marketing opportunity, big idea, etc and become successful.

What did they do different? They weren't smarter, had more money or worked harder than their competitors. What they did was persevere until they got lucky. Luck is a factor of probability and, as long as you don't have a real lemon of a product (and even sometimes if you do), you will be lucky… eventually.
More info here

http://www.news.com.au/technology/china-tests-new-stealth-fi...
Charging money for the service seems to be a decent model... That was a bit sarcastic, but seriously monthly subscription fees are generally a solid model. It depends on your market and customer profile though. Affiliate marketing is another e.g. Mint.com.
Using Chrome to calculate the square root of e
It maybe extremely obvious for most of the experienced HNers but I accidentally found it and I think it is quite neat.

It is just the Google Chrome Javascript console:
It is three clicks away: Wrench->Tools->Javascript Console

Sometimes you need to calculate something simple and you are not online or you do not have other more powerful tools. Just by:

>Math.sqrt(Math.E) ; square root of e
1.6487212707001282

Of course somebody can do much more things with that(it is the Javascript Console after all).

I found it neat and I wanted to share. I apologize to those that find it obvious.
I believe that's actually standard in Rails 3 to check for Unicode support.
With a little bit of scripting you can have your local working copy rsync'ed to a build-server at regular intervals.

I think there's even a hudson-plugin for that but I can't remember the name right now.

Granted, this still requires you to save your code before changes become visible, but honestly I don't see how an even finer granularity would help anything.
i went into it thinking the game used an algorithm of some type and i was surprised to find how simple it was. definitely not complex, mostly simple arithmetic.
Here's a great example of something that is most natural in mapreduce: http://www.danvk.org/wp/2007-04-06/nebulabrot/
There are reduce views there - both examples 2 and 3 use the built-in "_sum" reduce, which is equivalent to something like:

function(key, values, rereduce) { return sum(values); }

With regard to more advanced views: you'd be surprised how far you can get with the built-ins (_sum, _count, _stats); I've built a non-trivial data backend (on Cloudant, natch,) using pretty much entirely _sum reduces. Abusing the reduce with complex calculations doesn't seem to be worth it from either a disk space or query performance standpoint.
We live in an era of free information flow and that’s dangerous.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Administration continues to bloviate about other nations, and their "failures to respect intellectual property law".

At what point are those nations going to lose enough patience to point out the unbelievable corruption, cynicism, and mind-bending incompetence with which the law is administered in the first place?
This guy is statistically correct, but reading stuff like this is like kryptonite for entrepreneurs.

What this guy doesn't take into account is that in practice, not everybody is equal. If you learn from the right people and think in the right ways, you can position yourself much better so that your odds are much greater than 2% or whatever random number he threw out there.

It's lame when you see posts like this because all it does is make people want to quit when they are actually learning a lot and taking a chance and seeing what's possible. If you are enjoying what you are doing, keep on doing it for as long as you can.

Clearly it's not easy, and most entrepreneurs would love to face the challenges that successful ones do.
see the comment about the Indian company outsourcing their IT to America?
> with a sprayed on sealer

Like liquid glass?
Even better, Ham Radio. A hobby actually has an active community of people using their stations to communicate long distance with other in a (semi-)digital format. (E.G. PSK-31[1]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSK-31
bigresource.com comes up a lot when I'm searching for esoteric programming-topic solutions, and it's a totally worthless scraper.
PTC University – Engineering Training – CAD CAM Training Courses
"We think of almost everything as support-related" - Interview w/ Paul Kafasis
i want to know about mechanica
Well, by comparison...
I like the concept. The site itself was unusable for me in FF3.6/Linux. The site displayed after a bit of a wait loading, and then stalled my browser for 15 seconds or so before disappearing and leaving only a facebook like button at the top of the screen. It would be much better if you used plain html/css/js like other sites.

One mistake I think you're making is that you're building the site as though it already has lots of users. This only makes it feel empty. For example, you have many post categories, which you borrowed from craigslist because you don't yet know what categories you'll need because you don't have enough posts. At this point all this does is segregate users from each other, when the whole point of the site is to connect them! Lose the categories. The site needs to seem as busy as possible to attract users. Just show all the posts. If a city has no posts, show posts from surrounding cities. Worry about categories when there are too many posts to sort through.

Basically, keep it simple to start. There are so many parts to the site that I don't immediately know what I'm supposed to be doing. Don't worry about "sponsored posts", or "ads" or whatever else in a sidebar. Monetize later when you have users. For now you just have to focus on getting users.
Added it to a gist @
https://gist.github.com/779253
Squishables has good customer service too. The nose on the hedgehog I bought for my girlfriend torn. I emailed them and they just sent a brand new one (and replied in their absurd but nonetheless amusing cutesy speak they use throughout the site) No need to send back the old one (though I'm sure that's because you can't resale a used stuffed animal anyway but it sure does make things nicer). It was all very pleasant.
Florida Venture Forum
Bufferbloat vs. wireless networks, and other stories
i think a more realistic algorithm would detect how much coke is sold in a city, increase the demand+price appropriately based on some type of addiction multiplier, as well as increase the amount of police.
Yes, and this re-examination was initiated by the PTO director too! [The PTO can order re-exam on its own action (as opposed to action by an outside party)]

It may sadden you, but the patent was invalidated based on at least two pieces of prior art (patents in this case) that were both stick shaped dog toys.

The first is a patent (4577219) filed in 1984 for a stick shaped chewable dog toy ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=ANQ9AAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... )

The second is a design patent (D428220) filed in 1999 for a stick shaped pet toy ( http://www.google.com/patents?id=JJMEAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... ).

If you were also curious about the gory details of its re-examination process, you can pull it off of the patent application information retrieval (PAIR) service ( http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair ) -- enter the reexamination request number off of the re-exam certificate ( 90/006301 ) and click on "image file wrapper" and then you can see all of the actions undertaken.
FP means different to lispers, ML'ers and typeclassists (haskell, scala). Here's my attempt at a def

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2075192
And for Groupon, as well!
I misread this as teflon pants and thought "pretty specialty purpose but I bet it'd make cleanup easy"...
I'll try to simplify that. A good school should have:
mentors, peers, information, infrastructure.

Mentors - Intelligent people who guide you.
Peers - Friends and community to fulfill all kinds of human needs.
Information - The data that you must put into your head and the process designed to get it there.
Infrastructure - Equipment, tools, software, etc. Things you wouldn't have easy access to on your own.

I didn't get much one on one time with lecturers, and I'm an ambitious fool. I approached many, but I always felt like they were waiting for me to leave. I wasn't allowed to do anything in the labs except rush through some simple prewritten task. My peer group was great, and I do think that is one benefit of schools like this. They attract plenty of intelligent innocent young-ens and put them all in one place.

I would love to be a part of an online education community, I've actually just gotten really excited about that. Ideas brewing!
A two week trial is fine, but that still doesn't let non-technical people discover flaws in design/architecture/code.
Did this give anybody else goosebumps too? In a GOOD way, I mean? This is amazing.
I would answer it:

Find the most complex way to give a full and complete explanation, then for each bit assign a necessity value for how important it is.

Anything less than a complete explanation is obviously going to leave stuff out, so then you can decide where you want to make the tradeoff by looking at all information above a certain necessity threshold (how ruthlessly you want to cut down the explanation).

The quantification of each element of the explanation is going to be relative and arbitrary, but it's still easier to decide how far you're willing to go if you have numbers to base it on, even if they're made-up numbers.
I used to play Drug Wars on my calculator in high school. It was a really fun game, and I'm surprised it hasn't made it into the iPhone app store yet. Maybe because it's all about drugs.

I was thinking about this a few months ago. You could adapt the game to Color Wars--it'd be just as fun with the added bonus of way cooler graphics. Imagine the context is a world devoid of bright colors, and each drug is instead a color. It could look something like the food fight in Hook.
Hmm, having handled some of these assignments, I would say it's not done to increase billing hours. People keep their traps shut for two reasons: deeply hierarchical Indian org structures that don't tolerate opinion, and wanting to reduce friction as much as possible. The times we have pushed back we have been faced with "well, what do you know?" When that happens, the first guy to get slammed is the guy who asked questions. Rinse and repeat over a couple of projects and you get teams that will unquestioningly build you a handcart with a rocket engine.

Wanted to add, for every dollar an Indian firm makes, the average developer gets probably around 8-10 cents or less. When you are at a subsistence level like that, it's difficult to ask questions. You focus on the insecurity instead.
I agree completely, particularly with undergrad educations. Professers aren't picked on their teaching ability. They really don't have an incentive to improve the education of their students, other than personal diligence.
I don't understand what you're getting at.
It's since been fixed in Maverick for me (though who knows if it will resurface in Natty, as these kinds of bugs are wont to do). You might want to give Maverick a shot if you haven't already.

I hate shutting down every time too, but since I upgraded to 4 gigs of ram on my laptop starting from hibernate takes forever, so I shut down by choice now.
I, too, am self-educating, and would love to keep in touch. Same nick on twitter, etc.

My academic experience is mostly in history (esp. historiography, history of science and medicine), because I also want to be a librarian, but I've been programming since I was 5.
SV Computer History Museum overhauled
Counternotions
Microsoft Excel - Happy 25th anniversary, Excel
How is iPad Destroying the Future of Journalism?
ok. how about a website like slide.com, how do they monetize?
Three Ways to Retain Your Dev Flow
I agree, this math is terrible. Just. Terrible.

Please no one believe this post, it uses dubious statistics.
If you're looking for intros to programming, 1.00 is also a fantastic course (it's what made me switch to a CS major) which uses Java. The materials are a bit older than for 6.00 though.
There already are portable fuel cells, you still have to get the Hydrogen somewhere. Now if the Orbo worked, that'd be something different.

As for a hoverboard - sure it's technically more interesting than a Segway, but would it truly revolutionize anything?
Breed monkeys, give them keyboards, wait a million years.
IBM's Watson supercomputer plays a round of Jeopardy against grand champions
Obligatory exercise your cat with a laser pointer patent:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5443036.html

This was always included on the first day of any patent class in law school.
i always miss interfaces in smalltalk. sometimes i really want a guarantee that the receiver will actually listen when i send a particular message. Even if you don't agree with that part, interfaces are really nice because the system will tell you, "hey, you forgot to add a method to respond to X. you got the other four, but spaced out this one. you should do something about that."
You're not a true plumber until mushrooms make you grow to twice normal size and shoot fireballs
Certainly. But downvotes tend to be followed with reasons where the reason isn't plain - ie, spam. Which nothing here has been. People can take issue with my tone in the top level comment - I have no problem with that, especially because I am serious about what I said; I honestly wonder if this kind of "safety" might have been hand-waving by a higher-up to save money rather than prevent deaths. But the others?
He actually posted on his forum that Google makes up a minority of his traffic now, so it's not a huge worry for him.
I think Linus Trovalds in an interview was saying something of the sort:

I do not believe in crazy schedules. It does not worth it to work one day for 16 hours because the next day you will be like a ghost. Work as much that you will be able to work equally much and a lot the next day.

I do not think that it would be possible biologically to keep that pace of work(10-11 hours programming days) for long periods.

The exception: of course sometime when an emergency shows you should work and 10 and 15 and 18 hours straight
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