skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is the exact problem Goolge is facing right now. It's increasingly hard for them to keep their high standards in hiring worldclass engineers and hackers. There simply aren't that many of them.
Facebook Moves to Disallow Apps From Running Google Ads
this is the kinda thing that makes you think "shit, I've gotta teach myself to use proxies and then sign up!"

I mean, who doesn't want to be part of something that's specifically directed ONLY by what's the most fun?
Ask HN: what English TTS (Text To Speech) engine to use?
What are good opensource TTS engines ? Are there any as good as Apple OSX or at least as good as Google Translate one ?
I think you meant "...has not been..." and I agree with your points. However, one thing I have noticed among my friends and myself with apps is that there really only needs to be a few dozen apps and 80% of the planet are (is?) happy. Look at how static the top apps for ipad and iphone are month after month.

Provided porting an app to a new platform isn't too arduous then it could work out. Games especially, they are typically very easily ported since most run atop game engines that are very easily recompiled.

That said, I think Apple will eclipse HP with iPad2 and they have the 'cool' brand recognition. Think HP and you think printers still. Blackberry on the other hand...

Let's wait for the battery spec to really see how this thing will work out. Apple cut many many corners to give the ipad fabulous battery life and the video I have seen of the touchpad makes it look really slow, very unsnappy performance. Possibly they are running developer builds and it will be faster when it ships.
Watching the speech now. He's not stepping down. (Speech not done yet.)
What if that forged request was to a "create new account" URL, for example? Or to delete something important? Or transfer some money?

Do you need to see the response to do bad things?
I think maybe the ORM is being put forth as the good approach. In the 'simple is better than complex' section using the ORM was the 'complex' solution and using json was the 'simple' solution. In 'complex is better than complicated' the ORM is still the 'complex' solution, but that wins over the 'complicated' manual SQL solution.
They might as well call it a picture of a rope, or the twisted pair of an ethernet cable, or something equally fanciful.

The picture is horribly wrong because:

- It's left-handed and 10bp/turn. Only Z-DNA is left-handed, so it's obvious (to anyone that's taken a course in biochemistry) that they're missing two base-pair "rungs".

- If it's not supposed to be Z-DNA, where are the major/minor grooves?

In fact, none of the known unstrained DNA geometries match the picture:
A-form DNA has 11bp/turn,
B-form DNA has 10.5bp/turn, and
Z-form DNA is 12bp/turn.

"Artists" get this wrong frequently, but without any good reason because these structures have been well-known for several decades. Furthermore, incorrect pictures undermine biochemistry's beautiful basis: structure determines function. Would it have troubled them that much to search for correct information on the Internet (or a book)?

See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:A-DNA,_B... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-DNA
If you're going to ever end up in Istanbul, drop me a line through e-mail (the link on my profile has it) and I'll gladly buy you a beer and take you around! :)

Turkey and Greece should be no biggie, both are pretty darn stable.
I'm not sure about reading the books in sequence (I haven't tried it), and after a short period you'll probably find yourself referring to the papers they reference. I've heard good things about this as a first step:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408241

Otherwise, I'd recommend Engineering a Compiler, or Modern Compiler Design in X by Appel (where X is one of the languages in which the book is offered).
I read an in depth article on Watson a few months back and I remember that it said it does in fact do that sort of confidence-based buzzing, but I'm not 100% sure.
Never mind, you are right it is just to format decimals.
If he's not stupid he would have prepared for this contingency, and arranged for competent lieutenants who know how to do things "the Jobs way" to take over when he kicks off.

Of course the thing about power-mad dictators is that power-madness interferes with the ability to seriously consider transfers of power.
Open Letter to the United States Congress: 8 February 2011
Unless you want your URLs to look like twitter.com/someone#!someone_else, you're going to have to take the multi-step page load at some point when you transition from the HTML version to the AJAXy one.
How would you do that in Java given that you can't reify the stack?
2011 Market Trends Report: Warehouse Management Systems
The difference between Android and iPhone illustrated
I wonder at what point it starts dropping off. I know that if I added two employees to our company (currently just my co-founder and I), we would be vastly more efficient, since neither of us would have to context switch so much.
What's a good example of "perfect" API documentation?
Hopefully I'll have something more suitable for demoing in the next few weeks. Right now it's all sitting as a huge blob in an hg repository. There were a few performance problems that I've just finished fixing in the last 24 hours.

It sounds like your problem is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve; I started working on it because it was a problem I was having working industrially and couldn't find a good solution. Turns out there was a researcher at the local university that was also interested...

I've talked to other local web developers and have had mixed results. Some were pretty excited about it (and I'm getting ready to do some case studies with them for my thesis), but others didn't really seem to think it was something they needed.
Least Boring Way To Solve The Rubik's Cube
I don't go to CNN/NYT/BBC for hacker news. I don't go to Hacker News for world/political news. I don't go to McDonald's for steak and I don't go to Disneyland to check out a library book. All other websites and media channels are just a click away so put me down on the side of thinking a front page link about the Egypt situation is OT and inefficient for HN. If not, let's take it to the logical extreme and start submitting pictures of pretty ponies. Hackers can find pretty ponies interesting.
This is great news. However, it's unclear how the requirement to have users subscribed to Instapaper should be communicated to the users of third-party apps. Is there an easy way to subscribe new users? Does Instapaper provide any library support for this as part of its API?
No,with insects, every lens on their eyes is like a single pixel, and looking in a different direction - this combines multiple images and they're looking in the same direction.
Geckoboard's New Pricing
summary: intellectual property is very different from physical property and inevitably wants to escape into wider world, so called developing world in particular.

that's why we find our thesis that we should be selling higher margin products to developing world and leave cheap stuff to be produced by them broken - they get our knowledge essentially for free, leaving us without manufacturing base and without capability to fund innovation further. and there's nothing we can do about it either, in my opinion.
We hates your nasty, cruftsy, tricksy hard-to-read macroses! We hates them!
YoFile - Have your friends create your social network profiles
I just googled HP Touchsmart to see what it is. I'm amazed to discover that HP already has a range of iMac style all-in-one computers with touchscreens. And they ship with software that allows you to buy touch-enabled games and comic reading apps etc.

Seems like great synergy with WebOS, particularly as the review I found rated the hardware highly but thought the current software sucked. In fact they specifically noted the then recent purchase of Palm and speculated that webOS on a touch enabled PC would be a good move.

edit: they've got one of those convertible laptop/tablet things with the swivel hinge in the range too.
I think I didn't miss anything. That line just tells me that he is too lazy to re-install his apps.

Upgrade path from XP to 7? Even if there is one, his hardware won't last long with Windows 7, because I'm sure he hasn't upgraded his hardwares for last decade (too lazy to even re-install apps, what more can you ask?)

I remember I had to reinstall all my apps on Mac OSX and saw no one complain. I don't understand why all these XP users complaining about not being having a way to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP.

Just say it, you just don't want to pay for Windows 7. But after all, you get what you paid for.
SDCH looks to be going after a similar problem, but it would cache the templates between browsing sessions rather than just among consecutive pageviews. I'm not sure how well it would work for AJAX-y sites which rely on maintaining Javascript state, though, but potentially you could still use, e.g., localStorage for that purpose.
A hacker's guide to second language acquisition
This article is a great example of several currently important points about 'old media':

Exaggeration

The article exaggerates, wildly. So, the article shows a Stradivarius violin which will have to be one of the last 'macro' sized objects such a process has any hope of producing. I know enough about violins to say the exaggeration is much worst than even laughable nonsense. About the best they are talking about for the foreseeable future is a plastic violin. Since the accuracy of their 'printer' is only about 0.1 mm, they are talking about a crude plastic violin, one that will sell for less than the cost of some decent violin strings.

Competency

Maybe the author has some ability as a 'story teller' as in 'formula fiction' and English literature, but the content of the article has little connection with reality and no serious connection with the headline. The content is junk, incompetent.

Here the author wildly embarrassed himself trying to make a 'compelling story' out of the technology, but story telling, as in formula fiction, has been the main content of mass media at least since Ben Franklin. A 'good newsie' that gets a bad story will "make it good".

Basically story telling is all old media knows. Where it works, the result is essentially just light entertainment instead of anything seriously useful, informative, or instructional; where it doesn't work we get, right, 'Print me a Stradivarius'.

So, even 'The Economist' is not passing out solid information about the economy but only 'story telling'. Why? They hire 'writers' and 'editors' who used to be 'writers', and the traditions have been only story telling, not information.

Focus

The article is an example of much of what is seriously, even fatally, wrong with 'old media' where McLuhan was correct, "The medium is the message.". For 'Print me a Stradivarius', the content is a text version of "the great wasteland". So, the 'medium' was 'mass media' with only a few outlets but millions of readers so that the content had to be very broad, that is, not focused. Then competency didn't much matter.

Now with the Internet, there can be much more focus. Each reader has a chance to get content focused on each of their interests and good enough not to call exaggerated, incompetent nonsense. Examples include Hacker News, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and no doubt similarly focused Web sites for some thousands of other interests.

In all of technology mass media, there may not be a single 'professional writer' able competently even to review the more technical content of Hacker News and Stack Overflow. For the more technical content of Wikipedia, that's often past university professors even in their main subjects.

For "How a new manufacturing technology will change the world", that printing is nice but will "change the world" only very slowly. What is changing the world rapidly is the much better focused, much higher quality information coming to the Internet, nearly always by unpaid contributors, as 'new media'.
Yes, but not boxes - bags. They're called polybags, and they're cheap, durable, and very professional.
If that's the case, then why not stop hiring until more sufficient talent becomes available? Does this mean that Google's new hires are primarily there to increase headcount?
Money as a store of value is less important to me than money in fixed quantities.
He's speaking now on TV over there and the BBC says he'll stay in power until elections in September, which is basically the same thing the protesters were offered before.
Mubarak says that he will not be leaving office
I agree, I'm not sure I can comprehend a situation in which capturing the central figure with such high visibility is worth destroying the rest of the video frame.

edit - Maybe it would be good for scientists tracking animals, however the distance they shoot from would require a very wide array of cameras.
How difficult it is to create a repo on the folder in your Dropbox? (The answer, of course, is "it isn't"...)
>Best [programmer] measured by dollars - Bill Gates.

How many of those dollars did he earn actually programming.

Don't get me wrong I think he has been an awesome business man I just don't know how good a programmer he really is. Indeed he may be a most brilliant programmer but still have not really worked as a programmer in earning his fortune?
For those too lazy to follow the link, it's a satire on Demand Media and their ilk. It's in weblog format.

Entries include: "How to Pay Off Your Credit Card Debt" (Don’t confuse debt and debit. Debt is something you owe, debit is something you owei.), "How to Boil Water" (Boiling and broiling are different things. To broil water, put it in your oven and turn it to broil.), and "How to Become President of the United States" (If you’re president, you get all the nuclear weapons. Every president gets to destroy one country, so pick yours now.).

My personal favorite is "How to Sob Uncontrollably."
> Don't have a pen to write down your code

In the Android app you can long-press the generated code to open a context menu to copy the code into the clipboard. I'm not sure if the iPhone can support something similar, but I'll ask the developer.
Where is the Firefox version?
I haven't tried it, but I don't like being bothered with extra stuff, I can't even imagine my mother dealing with this stuff.

If we can't simplify our users lives, we have failed. Is security hard? Hell it is. But we can do better and we MUST do better, for the love of science.
Ask HN: Appsumo needs your help
Appsumo has a killer Lean Startup Bundle coming next month and I need your help to get this right. I need a quip to print on a sticker that geeks worldwide will proudly sport on their laptops. It can be an image (Ries with the Che Guevara treatment?) or a would-be slogan.

It must be hilarious, speak to the lean startup "movement" and printable on a sticker

Here's a few to start you off:
"Pivot", "My MVP just facebooked your mom" and "Iterate or Die"

CAN YOU SEE WHY I NEED HELP?

What's in it for you? Seeing your words on the laptops of your cohort! A good word from me to the Masters of the Universe aka McClure and Ries!

Leave a comment that we can use on the stickers! Thanks!
I'm not sure this addresses the issues for which people pay for monitoring which is primarily to call police in the case of a break-in and fire fighters in the case of a fire. A text message to my phone is just not the first thing I would want when paying for home security.

Don't get me wrong, in home monitoring is an area where there is probably a great market opportunity, I just am not sure that this addresses it in a broadly appealing way.
Meet London's new entrepreneurial elite
A new generation of London entrepreneurs is redefining work hard, play hard.
The promise of the internet has always been real. The only issue is trying to get too far ahead of what the current technology can deliver.

Just now (in 2011) we are living up to most of the tech promises made in 2000. I'll get worried about another bubble when money starts chasing technology that is obvious vaporware.
Profit Sharing
If you were given the following options for remuneration - which would you pick?

(1) Hourly Rate $70; no profit sharing

(2) Hourly Rate $60; 1% of net revenue; capped at $20,000 per year

(3) Hourly Rate $50; 2.25% of net revenue; capped at $50,000 per year

(4) Hourly Rate $40; 5% of net revenue; capped at $80,000 per year

Also, the hourly rate bumps up to $70 automatically once there is $1.5M of cumulative revenues.
"externalities" don't put the food on the table, let alone buy the table.

or will the future economy be "click on this really cool web app and send its' creator a loaf of bread!"?
This is a great anecdote, but not for the reasons she thinks:
>He worried for
weeks about the meeting, and when the day arrived he even drove home at
lunch (an hour-long journey) to make sure he looked just right. Midway
through the presentation, the manager stopped him and asked coolly, "Why
are you showing this to me?"
shoe sales vs programming

big difference in type of people needed and what those people need to be happy and productive.
Don't Die on Third
That's what I'm thinking too. Most of the other tools in this space (Firebug, XDebug, Speedtracer, etc) are all free and I don't expect people to suddenly start paying for performance tools when everything else is open source. Since this is thesis work, I have to publish the techniques I'm using to build this tool (although I don't have to publish the source code).

For consulting, though, I've built up a pile of expertise over the last two years. I've developed very strong skills for identifying and fixing performance problems, and this tool is just a way to make my life easier.

One possible approach I've considered is to open-source the tool. This has a few benefits and a few disadvantages:

- Benefit: this type of tool enters the broader developer eco-system. People start to recognize that focusing on single components is a bad way to solve performance problems.

- Benefit: other people can contribute to make the tool better.

- Con: competition. If other people are using the tool, then I end up with a fair bit more competition for the consulting services.
Not really any good evidence to support that conclusion unless you're using Barr's statistical methodology. That coder's responses to Barr aren't that far off from what I'd say in his position. It's not surprising that a programmer would be familiar with Internet geek subculture, and predicting that Anonymous will turn LOIC on a direct challenger is not much of a leap.
He does understand. The Turing test is to answer if machines can feign human intelligence. To pass a Turing test, feigning (not necessarily possessing) intelligence is enough.

The answer to insight into a system's qualia is not a Turing test:

Watson, tell us, do you feel fear? Crunching through some look-up tables Yes!

What did that prove about Watson feeling fear or not? We could have Alice talking with Watson for hours on end about fear and daddy issues, without them even knowing the taste of fruit.

That is why the Turing test is an incomplete test for human-like machine intelligence. You seem to equate feigning intelligence, with possessing intelligence. Feigning fear with possessing fear.
Yep, exactly what I do. But it would be nice to run "hg commit -m xxx && hg push" from within this extension. Then I could commit on the move :)
Mubarak refuses to step down
Most all of the special vehicles and secondary markets I have heard of require you to be an accredited investor to participate. You have to be somewhat wealthy to be an accredited investor ($200,000/year income or $300,000 if married)

I've heard these arguments a lot, but I've never seen anyone point to a specific case where someone with under a $50,000 a year income ends up with these stocks. Other than employees of course.
The pretty examples aren't in order. In this case the doctests are the "pretty".
I average 40 credit card transactions per month, or about $20/month -> $240/year under SwipeGood's average-50-cents-to-charity-per-swipe model. Assuming that's typical, since the average American household donates approx. $1000/year, a SwipeGood user would be increasing their household's giving by 20%. (Swipegood takes 5%)

But it'd be interesting to find out if users ended up giving less outside of SwipeGood because they feel they've "already given"-- or if they end up giving more because they have charities on the mind (giving to one cause is unsurprisingly strongly correlated with other philanthropic activities.)

Edit: Also, I think it's great that YC is funding a startup like this. I'm reminded of "Be Good": http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
> If I go to Gawker with lynx right now, it will not work, period.

As a specific issue, that seems like a minus, but an exceedingly minor one, as lynx is probably a negligible proportion of Gawker's audience. In principle, backwards-compatibility is a great thing, until it impedes some kind of desirable change, such as doing something new or doing it more economically.

> it seems a frightening proposition that $entity can start putting out arbitrary standards

I generally do want someone putting out new standards, and sometimes it's worth breaking backwards-compatibility to an extent. So it really depends on $entity: if it's WHATWG, great. If it's Google, then more caution is warranted. But there's been plenty of cases of innovations (e.g. canvas) starting with a specific player and going mainstream from there. I do agree that Google's approach feels like an ugly hack in a way that is reminiscent of favicon.ico.

> All of this is moot, of course...

This is good general advice, but it's not always true. At least one webapp I've worked on has many important ajax-loads triggered by non-anchor elements; it's about as useful in lynx as Google maps would be. The devs could go through and convert as much as possible to gracefully-degrading anchors, that would at least partly help with noscript, but it seems like a really bad use of resources, given the goals of that app.
I guess you haven't tried the AllegroCL IDE :)
summary: too much flair vs not enough

(Office Space movie reference. Hilarious must see.)
Ask HN: Sources for making a product video.
Developing a web application for a social enterprise and want to create a product video. Here are some comps we like: Blurts (http://blurts.com/), GetPunchd (http://getpunchd.com/) and Lissn (http://lissn.com/). Any ideas on where to find the right talent to create a one minute video with similar attributes? Thank you!
as per the latest new he is not resigning
http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/22309266;_ylt=AlFEJ8...
I have a relative with a fire proof gun safe in another state. This is a good place for crypto keys, master passwords, etc. For the cost of overnight Fed Ex, I can recover from a disaster.
Another interesting look at the psychological theory of money on a recent This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/423/t...

In particular, the section from about 10:30 discusses how Brazil combatted inflation by essentially replacing their currency with something that everyone agreed was valuable.
Well, I need help from AppSumo ;-)

I get emails about things I want to buy from AppSumo. I click through to your website on the same day I receive said emails. Your site confirms my email address. I'm then shown a DIFFERENT product/bundle than what I was emailed about. It has happened twice...and makes me less likely to click through in the future. I thought AppSumo usually only offered one bundle at a time, so I'm confused as to how this is happening...?
See also:
Why the water mill is creating lots more value than jobs C14

Why the steam engine is creating a lot more value than jobs C19

Why electricity is creating lots more value than jobs C20