skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's definitely not boring, and also awesome. Like I said, sometimes you find a clever hack. But if I saw that code in a code review, it would be a huge red flag for me. I'd want to see a pretty good justification for using it instead of a more standard algorithm. (It happens to be in this case that there IS a good justification).
Agreed I have not really been participating for long but have managed to get myself upto a point where I can participate easily. It just requires some effort and some knowledge
ARM updates roadmap with Kingfisher, Cygnet
It might not be as interesting as building your own, but the Palm Pre gives you root access and Palm is very supportive of third party app stores. So if all your after is a more open touchscreen device you aren't forced to build your own.
Don't worry, they'll just put a new clause in the agreement that says you can't charge more to iOS users than non-iOS users. Stores won't raise their prices 30% for all users or they'll go out of business. So they'll either give Apple their 30% or not sell through iOS devices at all. Not necessarily an easy choice, especially if you're already established with millions of iOS users.

That 30% will not come out of your pocket; it will come out of the provider's pocket. Apple will see to that, don't worry.

Apple will amend that agreement as many times as they need to in order to maximize the benefit to them. Let's not kid ourselves and think the benefit is for their users. I think we're all wise to that one by now.
Exactly, and Aussie cities are VERY expensive to live in. Sure wages are higher, but Sydney especially is one of the most expensive and congested cities to live in in the world.
2.5K of RAM? Sign me up for 2000!
which is ironic, given that a cucumber is saying it.
What next for IPv6, IPv4 and ISPs?
Re 13" MBP: Good point. The UI itself will probably look a bit tight as well.
You can keep your job bartending in the outback.

I live in the expensive-to-live-in Boston area. I have an hour commute each way. Sometimes I stay late nights. And on days like today the option is either burn vacation time or telecommute because for my own safety's sake there's no way in hell I'm taking the T and the bus in this blizzard.

But... (and this is the clincher) I program robot submarines for a living. I'm a significant contributor to the code that navigates and controls AUVs around the world -- Australia included. In short, I get paid to do something awesome. If I were still stuck in the webdev ghetto or doing enterprisey bullshit for banks, I'd be on the first plane outta Logan as soon as the snow clears. But the sheer ass-kickingness of my job -- and the doors of opportunity this experience will give me later -- keep me firmly anchored.

And I think that's entirely rational.
Is there a way to decrease the swappiness of OS X?
The service only works over SMS right now, that's why they ask for a phone number...
A Hole in the Internet (Egypt)
Mike, thanks for that! I live in San Francisco, and if you want to e-mail me to collaborate, drop a line to sfganjastartup@gmail.com
When I read really great code, I often think "This is all there is?". It seems like there is too little code to do all the things that it does. Or what is there seems trivial, so simple that it couldn't have required any thought or effort to produce.

Bad code is full of stuff, it twiddles bits here and there, does complicated things in nested loops and works very hard to accomplish very little.

This might make bad code seem more interesting, at first glance it seems like it does more, when in fact it generally does less, just with much more complexity.
There's definitely a similarity between the two principles. That shouldn't be surprising since code is basically a programmer's user interface to the computer.
I ended up cutting off the part about net neutrality (it was getting pretty long [this was originally all one long comic], but I'll probably submit that when I post it.

I made this because I was repeating myself a lot when talking to people about net neutrality. The question about "well can't we just start our own ISP?" comes up a lot. I figured that this illustrated the concept of what an ISP is pretty effectively, and I'll probably link people to it in the future if I'm explaining it.

This might not be appropriate for HN, but hopefully a couple of people will find it useful.
Here's a tip.

Maybe next time you're looking for a business partner you shouldn't mention that you used to have a habit of breaking and entering office buildings while "in a ganja-induced haze".

Signed,

Someone who has done his fair share of drugs.
You really want the post office to maintain a list of every friend who might ever send you a wedding invite?
I'm so glad to see a heavy hitter like 37signals coming out in opposition to "app madness".

As I've commented here before, I see the current native app trend as nothing more than a replay of the browser wars of the early 2000's - folks developing with IE specific features etc.

The natural tendency for programmers is to do less work. This native app bollocks is purely the result of commercial interests of device manufacturers: if you make it harder to develop cross platform stuff then developers must choose a platform. If developers must choose a plaform that means one platform will have all the coolest stuff, driving sales of the device.

I own and love my Nokia e72 and was really pissed off when 37signals released an iPhone app rather than creating a mobile web app.

The Nokia e72 browser probably won't cope with the HTML5ness of the Basecamp offering but at least there's hope! I will never use an iPhone because I need a qwerty keyboard (try typing find . -name "*.php" | xargs grep -il "function someFunction" on your iphone keyboard - or try editing a file in vim via SSH ... yeah, didn't think so).

At least with this trend maybe my next phone will have access to mobile Highrise goodness!
I think it will be interesting to see how this dispute will end. In any case the user will loose, take Amazon for example, I see two possibilities:
1. Amazon will leave App Store. We loose because we can not use our iPads and iPhones to access Kindle books.
2. Amazon will comply with the Apple demand and they will cut 30% for Apple ... hmmm ... Basically they will be forced to rise the price of their books to allow for some profit. We loose.
No, for English and French (the one I know), someone who understands the original language, can figure out most of the spoken language. However, for the variant of Arabic they can fail. My mother told me that in Kuwait native sellers turn to the original Arabic in order to be understood.
About $15.3 billion in revenue. [1] I'm not a fan of organized littering and haven't used the yellow pages in years. I can see how it makes sense for all the vendors of a particular service cluster together, in the Steven Johnson _Emergence_ sense [2].

1. http://www.simbainformation.com/pub/2523077.html

2. http://books.google.com/books?id=qAtgKyaLH4MC&pg=PA107&#...
The new neurosexism (book review)
The solution is straightforward: generate truly random boards, evaluate them, and then use the set that fits your payout profile. The problem is that these boards will lack the enticing hooks that keep folks coming back. The complete solution is to also discard boards that are not enticing enough. The result will have fewer artificial patterns like the ones used in the article to determine winners.
Hmm, this situation is like owning an electric vehicle. The manufacturers are passionate about technology, and they invented a flywheel that can store massive amounts of energy, giving your vehicle incredible transient acceleration response. They ship many vehicles with this new feature, but unfortunately, they forgot to account for what this would do to the battery charge display after starting. As a result, their reps keep on having to explain that the vehicles are not rapidly leaking charge shortly after starting -- instead that energy is being placed in the flywheel where it can greatly increase the car's responsiveness.

Whoops!

The difference between the scenario above and Linux's disk cache? Techies blame the former on the car company but the latter on the end-users.
Dead Drops for 'Un-cloud' File Sharing
I don't understand, what's the point?

On first glance, it seems like it was created for the purpose of advertising Aviary, but even if it's not, I'm rather fond of NYC as it is. There's a certain familiarity that the advertising breeds.
I don't have facebook or foursquare so am unable to try it. But from the pitch I think it might be useful. I worry though about anything that encourages the herd mentality. I like to go to places I know to be fun or interesting rather than just because there are other people there. The serendipity angle to life is oft overlooked. By herding its hard to discover anything novel.

But I will try it when you have gmail log in.
Say what you will, but I find my Tornado templates much less verbose than in Django, even when respecting the rules of "proper" templating.

Also, I just realized you're my former coworker. Hi Igor, it's Yusuf :)
We use Clicky's real time Web Analytics http://getclicky.com/66372805 (affiliate link)
How A Do-Gooder Site Got 14 Million Members
They lost me at "resistive touch screen."

Does anyone have a good source for a similar device with a larger screen and capacitive touch?
Experimenting with CouchDb as a mail store.
You Have To Be F'Ing Kidding Yahoo
I would just hike my price to offset the 30% cut exclusively for iOS and be done with it. Or if that's too obnoxious, provide a "limited-time 30% discount" on my own site off the "list price".
Any community where you get "points" of any kind becomes a game, which eventually becomes more important than the community itself.
Pedantic is fine. I mean templates so complex as to become a bottleneck in processing web requests (rendering the template takes more time than any other operation performed). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottleneck#Bottlenecks_in_softw.... In your scenario, if you can cache the data, you can likely cache rendered templates, or parts of the rendered templates, or introduce a caching reverse proxy.
Yellowpages were great in college for eating off of.

Its basically a giant set of paper plates and/or placemats. Use, rip off the top page or two, throw away!
Is there any precedent at all for an enforceable regulation banning a particular form of speech by declaring it "wasteful"? That it clearly is wasteful is besides the point.
One of the things that surprised us about the Valley is that good pizza is more expensive here than on the East Coast. I'm still not sure why. But there is a noticeable difference when you have to order pizza 30 at a time.
Interesting, I wonder if this bulk micro financing of start ups could become a new financial product. Find 30 - 100 small start ups, give them all a whack of cash that's backed by a bond. Sell the bond and repeat.
Dropr is a portfolio service that allows creative people to showcase their work
That's the beauty of open-source hardware :)
anyone know of a dataset that has dates for when companies when companies registered or announced in the news? For example I would like to see the data hackernews was launched.
None of these are straight-forward “linear” sums: there are differing amounts of each type of cone cell in the retina (and the proportions vary from one part of the retina to another), there are several levels of combination of signals which we don’t fully understand currently, the eye/brain adapts to what it’s just been looking at, what else is in the visual field, what it knows the light source to be, what “memory colors” it expects for an object, and so forth.

Thinking of the mechanisms of the eye operating directly on “FFFFFF” is a very imprecise model for what’s happening.
I would have gone for something big and expensive, like, say, the lunar module. Is anyone making a new lunar module or a hydrogen dirigible these days?
Time Warner Buys NaviSite For $230M
If you're going to use find | xargs, please use find -print0 | xargs -0 or I will put a newline in a filename so that you rm something you didn't want to.

Also acceptable: find . -name '*.php' -exec grep -il "function someFunction" {} \;
Brutal honesty places an impetus on the person being criticized to either fight back and prove why they're right, or to fix their code quicker.

Honesty without a push is just a statement and nothing more.
Why are the results expected?

(Also, I really need to expand the Munsell Wikipedia article, but Albert Munsell was dead before much of the empirical work that went into the 1929 Munsell Book of Color – by that point his son was running the company – or into the 1943 Munsell Renotations, which were based on the work of the Optical Society of America.)
Why? Well, in my case, I want something better than 20k files in one nnmh directory.

On my test Maildir (copy of my INBOX from a few weeks ago), `du -s ~/Maildir` reported 81MB and the CouchDb database is 76.3MB.

There's lots to be done:

* handle MIME as binary objects where possible. That should use less storage space than the uuencoded message parts.

* store seen and other Maildir flags

* write (non-web) frontends, preferably gnus.
There is no way to offer better terms than a convertible note with no cap and no discount.

At least no current way. I suppose you could have a valuation floor instead of a cap, or a negative discount. I've never heard of that happening. It would be something if things ever came to that.
Brian Chesky (AirBNB), once when asked if they were Ramen profitable, and responded "even better, we are pizza profitable". Maybe it was the same reporter?
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2005)
How many YC companies fold four months in?

The only reason I've heard for a YC company closing is "not enough traction", or some variation of "not enough passion" - I've never heard "not enough money", although I'm sure it happens too.
Nexus S? Nexus One? Nokia N900? OpenMoko FreeRunner? OpenPandora?

There are more than a few more powerful alternatives to an iPhone that are open source and ready to hack. Most of them can even make phone calls.
I'm currently reading Kevin Kelley's book and am enjoying it, but I find his "technology NEVER dies" conjecture mostly uninteresting. I guess it's a strong enough statement that it begs for disproof, but I haven't heard any interesting conclusions that rely on it.
I agree that good code is usually quite easy to read and shouldn't requires big efforts of the reviewer. When I need to read some functions 2-3 times to understand it.. or when I need to switch from a "calm/boring" attitude to a "crap, I really need to think hard" attitude, it's usually a sign that it wasn't well written. It's not necessarily "bad code" but more of a sign that the programmer didn't reread himself to make sure it was clear.

Anyway, for me, the biggest hint for a bad code is big functions. It's somewhat really counterintuitive and I can't understand why people still continue to write like this. And worst, they sparse comments to separate the different sections of the function.. gasp
Announcing CodeConf 2011 (GitHub is putting on a conference)
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." – Brian W. Kernighan
A normal person would interpret his intention as blocking bulk rate spam. Personal invitations are sent first class.
is there a way to download the document? pdf?
I heard this on the radio on the way to work this morning. The obvious thing that came to mind was the technology used to build the pyramids.
Student Suspended for Calling Teacher Fat on Facebook
Disallow attendants to buy tickets while they're on the job. [However, they could signal accomplices to buy it for them. It would take a team, then.]
I think this is in a state of flux.

"You can add users who aren't in your domain to the shared contacts list using the Shared Contacts API script. The Shared Contacts API will also allow you to enter in additional details like address, phone number and more to domain contacts. These additional details will only appear when shared contacts are viewed in the Contacts Service. The Shared Contacts API is supported by our API team."

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
Ballista, scorpio exist only in re-enactments and are far from the functionality of the originals...Their historical range is ~400 meters, replicas do ~150.

Being gimped is not exactly "going extinct."

Damascus steel - exact process lost

There is now a compelling claim for having found the process again.

Functionality of tools remains, but some specifics are drastically different, so it gets subjective.

That's the thing. It's hard for functionality or the need for it to disappear. And where it's supplanted by superior functionality, there's still reenactment. There is probably technology that has disappeared, but only in the case where we've completely lost all mentions or records of it. That's the only way something can get beyond the reach of the re-enactors. However, by the time something's gotten that obscure, it's been too thoroughly forgotten to be counted.

In other words, we can't find lost technology, because technology is really informational in essence, and if it's lost it's lost from anyone's consciousness or any known record by definition.
Who cares?

If I hit a wall while working on a problem, I toss into the gladiator pit known as Stack Overflow, and after it has been mawed to pieces by a bunch of brilliant people, I stop by and get my answer and can continue whatever I was doing. Usually this all happens in the time it takes for me to get some coffee and maybe take a short walk.

It is a beacon of hope and joy to someone who has wasted too much time in the past trying to find the answers to hard problems.

So they are at each-others' throats trying to out answer other users so they can increment up a point counter. Gamefication is a great motivator, and I am happy that I don't have to use the typical motivators of begging, pleading, or -ugh- paying for quality technical support.

Emotional reactions to the competitiveness is the success of a very well designed game that has the outcome of great answers to problems that are typically hard to find.
They may just be using terms in the referring URL rather than the referring page. It'd probably yield better data. Most site-specific search pages would have the search term in the URL.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're more interested in data from domain-specific sites like epicurious than generic search sites like Google.

I'd also guess that this won't work once the SEO guys figure out they can feed fake clickstreams to MS.
I have been elucubrating on the topic for a while; I think some of your points are not so important (a pretty homepage will be needed once the community is quite large, not for a just-started project).

By the way, my thoughts on community projects are here:

http://ollivander.franzoni.eu/2010/12/building-successful-co...

it's a multipart post, not yet finished.
What? Read their statement again.

"...if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app.."

It says if the app lets you purchase books from somewhere that is not the app, the app should also let users purchase through the app. Apple said nothing about "content...can't be accessed within the app, unless it's also available for sale via Apples store." There was nothing said about what content can and can't be accessed.
$14.28 :)

And Apple does not allow fractional prices.
No kidding. I was working on a very similar, event-loop-based system in Lua, but after spending more time with Erlang, I realized that it was already done a million times better. Lua's very good for other stuff, but massive concurrency is not its focus.

I wrote a (somewhat limited) Lua asynch. webserver to provide a REST interface to my distributed filesystem, but I'm not interested in generalizing it or making it uber-scalable anymore. It uses select (luasocket.select, actually), which is quite good enough for my purposes. It's not the primary part of the system, anyway - it was actually feature creep.

The thing that really bugs me with node.js is writing everything in callback-passing-style. Coroutines are SO much cleaner.
They probably have to specify exactly what percentage of income is given out in winnings. Not to protect the lottery company, but to protect lottery buyers.
The form of speech itself isn't banned, merely the method of distribution. The FCC bans broadcasting without a license (wasting bandwidth), and most areas would frown on scattering pamphlets on the ground (littering).

More to the point, at least one form of wasteful marketing speech has been heavily regulated nation-wide: spam, since the CAN-SPAM act.
The service is more general than that. From the pitch above you'll note that it intends to allow people to ask specific questions about a location, not just to signal where you might like to go to spend a night. In this case, the more people that use it, the more likely it is that your question will be answered and that it will be accurate and timely.
Government is an industry with extremely high barriers to entry (want to start a country? Win a war first) and customer lock in (don't like this country? have to leave your entire life behind).

In other words, your argument is that a monopoly in a certain service, given the power to force customers into what it wants at the price it wants, will care more about you than a private entrepreneur just because they have to keep elections once every 4 years...

The reality is that elections are just forward actions of future loot, where politicians buy votes by promising goodies to certain people at the expense of others. Laws that benefit a special interest in a huge way but cost every tax payer a dollar or 2 always pass. Democracy is divide and conquer on steroids.

You also give an example of a negative externality. That's what courts are for. All the law principles that help solve externalities efficiently (habeus corpus, compensating the victim instead of the state) were the result of free competition in common law merchant courts. Again, if the government cares so much about you, why is the murderer of your family member now doing cheap labor in prison for the state rather than for you to compensate the loss?

You know, I wish life were as easy as just coming alltogether, wishing for a better life and giving a TED talk about it. It just isn't. You need to stop looking at intentions and start looking at incentives.
I think artsy is the wrong word. It's just more muted, pastel and common.

As of my check, there is a giant chimp mascot on the front page, so they might have changed that, but the rest just looks like 50% of design shop redesigns from the last 3-4 years.

The massive title on the home page is "Still free, just bigger." Still free what? Spell it out for people.

I, like almost everyone commenting here, preferred the older design and personally would've run with tweaking that for the next 2-3 years rather than pushing out a redesign for the sake of it.
Studying the Brains of NFL Players
And if you're impressed, what happens? Do you help me? Because I'll fight tooth and nail to impress you if you'll help me.

Seriously.
About time. I have been getting these for years and never even unwrapped the plastic. It is a massive waste. Four phone books have sat unopened in the lobby of my apartment for weeks now. No-one wants them and no-one wants to throw them away.
CodeConf 2011 // A conference focused on social coding presented by GitHub
It's really interesting, the word serendipity keeps coming up around this concept. I'm giving a talk at TEDxConcordia later this month titled "Losing Serendipity", though it has nothing to do with Localmind. Certainly gives me more fodder for the talk.