skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Science Behind Traffic Jams
Good to know someone else had this idea and acted upon it :)
Article has it exactly backwards.

"In January, Netflix responded by hiring its first Washington lobbyist..."
Oh my. Vaya con dios Lone Ranger.
I don't think google will ever win at social, every site that started small changed and adapted to what the users wanted, google can't do that, they launch a new site and bam millions of users instantly; yet all these users want different things, so instead of shaping the experience around what they need to get users (what Facebook did) they're catering to what they think will retain users. They have to find out what users want without the access to "organic" information, market research is proven time and time again to be worthless.

The problem of getting users is often one that defines a site, when you don't have that problem it becomes a battle to stop users leaving to better more "mature" pastures. I think the next big social site (if there ever is one) will be a no-name small-gone-big site, but even then with how everyone (users) is about social now (they want to be instantly in on the next big thing) I doubt that can happen. I think that maybe Facebook is the end of social sites, which feels strange and ridiculous to say, but maybe.

Google will never "get" social, there is nothing to get.

Edit: in fact I think a great example of this is Google Wave. It was a fantastic product for a variety of tasks, project management was one, yet Google pitched it as the "next big thing" to users so they all joined with ridiculous expectations of what it was and wasn't and now look what happened... Tumblr is another great example in the other direction, what the site is now is very community orientated, yet from the interviews I've seen with the founder (David something) it didn't seem as if this was intention from the get go, yet users used the site like that and so they adapted and enabled users to use it like that. Now look, they're huge. Does anyone know of any products launched by big companies (Google, Microsoft etc.) that did go big? I can't think of any off hand, would be interesting to look at how they grew and developed.
No, the Prelude has not been rewritten and there are no plans to do so. Which axiomatic set should be the basis of a Mathematical Prelude? That's a rather tough question to answer, being that there are many arbitrary but not quite compatible answers. Instead, the focus has shifted to shrinking the Prelude, at least in Haskell':

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Prelude
China opening roughly two new movie theaters a day
Because NASA is a big government bureaucracy, and he's been working there since 1966.

Instead of thinking that there's got to be some truth to it, think that when there's a whiff of BS and it looks like the work of a bunch of delusional cranks publishing in their own vanity journal, it's nonsense and should be ignored.
agree with sidmitra but the idea sounds great
I thought, trying to be charitable - "it's [http://journalofcosmology.com/] not that bad, OK - not the worst, table based, outset borders, kinda minimalist maybe". Then \BAM\ the background loaded and assaulted my visual cortex.
What's cute is that much of the time when I pay for something it's instantly charged to my card - my account balance reflects the deducted money, whether it's been actually moved out to the other account or not. But if a merchant gives me a credit/refund, it can take several days for that to show up - some places will say "two billing cycles" (although they have no idea how long my billing cycle is - I presume they mean their own internal cycles).

Money already seems to be moved somewhat instantly, but only ever out of my accounts.
Now Macroglossa.com works with video.
The Tweetie app "upgraded" to Twitter for iPhone; they're treated as the same app by the App Store. I don't think it's possible to tell apart upgraders from new users. (I paid for Tweetie)
Theoretically the broker also has the incentive not to waste time with you, and to make you happy so that you give referrals. Since rental turnover is a lot higher, this would be even stronger an incentive than for home sales.
Same thing in The Netherlands, I can transfer money to my dad and it shows up almost instantly in his account.
That's a great idea, I'm sure you can get quite a few good ideas if you watch it for long enough.
Good job!
And all of this because the credit card model is fundamentally flawed. When buying something it's like sending the seller a trivially copyable key to your vault and letting him get the money he wants.
We've got a few open positions in Seattle at Brightcove:
http://www.brightcove.com/en/company/careers
Web breaks echo-chambers
Http://www.geeks.com/techtips/2010/speeding-up-your-pc.asp
A good alternative is PadMapper.com. Somehow, they are able to cut out a ton of crap from the over postings. Worth a shot if you are looking for an apartment.
An example that I just came across in normal usage:

git show <branch_name>:<filename>

This will show you the contents of <filename> on <branch_name>. It does not show you the diff of that file for the latest commit to <branch_name>; it spits out the state of that file to the $PAGER. This is something that 'git diff' does not do. Note that <filename> doesn't even have to exist on the current branch, and you don't even have to have a working tree (i.e. you can do this in a bare repo to inspect file contents without actually needing to checkout a working copy of all of the code).
Great idea! I like it a lot... sorry I can't be more helpful/critical but it's working nicely for me and it looks good! Well done.
The Google executive(?) who set up the original Facebook event page that inspired/kicked off the Egyptian revolution.
Zipdial: Mobile verification without texting
It's not about Python > Perl. It's about Scrapy is older (AFAIK) than Scrappy. If it were the other way around, I would have proposed that Scrapy rename or at least reference Scrappy.

The point is to avoid confusion among users who might not know about both tools.
Apple definitely wants a piece of the mobile advertising market otherwise they wouldn't have created the iAd network. And I speculate Apple will drop Google from the Safari search box at some point and replace it with a custom location & context aware "mobile search" engine.
It's a logic error in remarkable_rails that results in an infinite loop on Ruby 1.9.

Andrew Selder tracked the issue down and provided the fix:

https://rspec.lighthouseapp.com/projects/5645/tickets/1027-s...
Plus 1 for for Charles. In the last month I've used it to determine:

- What an OAuth-signed SOAP envelope looks like, when Google (who prefer OAuth and require SOAP for some APIs) don't yet have it documented.

- That Chrome will encode links itself if necessary, but Firefox will not, causing a download on a colleagues app to not work on FF.

- That I'd accidentally seyup up my non-desktop app as a desktop app when registering for access to the Twitter API, resulting in an XML error response that Chrome wasn't showing me.

All over HTTPS. If you don't have an app like this (works on Windows, Mac and Linux) you need it.
Can tcpflow set up fake TLS certificates like Charles?
Facebook's envelopment 
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/singel-facebook-empire/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

This article from Wired discusses a new offering by Facebook that lets news websites use Facebook as the platform through which comments are posted. The primary benefit for the websites seems to be leveraging Facebook's network to draw more users to their sites; the primary benefit for Facebook seems to be further enveloping a new area. Right now, Facebook users can "like" or "share" many news articles in addition to traditional comments on the news articles themselves. By completely replacing a comment section with a Facebook-driven alternative, Facebook will have completely enveloped participating news sites in terms of owning the user experience beyond reading.

Thoughts?
If you earn >$1 million per year in profit with the niche product, would you regret not going for the hypothetical millions more you might have earned with the consumer product?

(Of course, the need to part with equity for external investment and lower margins might mean a successful consumer product company ends up returning less cash to the founders than a much smaller bootstrapped b2b company anyway)
Translogic takes the all-electric Z-Kart for a spin
Absolutely. A record of solid past work can help overshadow a poor interview (nervousness, etc.) in my eyes.

If I can see the sorts of things a candidate has worked on in the past, I can more tailor the interview and ask more engaging questions. I want to know what they're passionate enough about that they will give up free time to pursue it.

None of this is specific to Github.
This is an old article. Mount --bind solves the directory hard-linking problem for root, and there is no compelling reason to allow users to hardlink directories.

Also, making a file-system not a tree adds a lot of complexity for questionable gains.
Spotify . You have a free plan with ads, one without ads, and the premium plan with mobile access and offline play.

http://www.spotify.com/uk/get-spotify/overview/
I respectfully disagree with you. There is obviously a far higher quantity of technical 'information' on the web, but almost none of it reaches the standards of the professional writing that was done by Byte.

The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving. Some of them are informative but most of them lack perspective, and many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertising driven. There are notable exceptions, HN obviously, and LTU for example. But most of what gets posted on HN is junk. Hacker Monthly is a gorgeously executed but frankly it reads like an 80's fanzine, and LTU is great but super-narrow.

What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize it to produce something with added value.

That kind of activity only happens when there are professionals who are skilled and able to do it. Just wanting to write about stuff isn't enough.

We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but we've lost perspective and sadly social news sites don't magically bring it back. They can only filter what actually gets produced.

I would link you to some of the articles I am referring to, but whoever owns byte.com now has taken the archive off-line.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing the web - it's added a lot. But it's also taken stuff away that it hasn't replaced so far, and the everything is free but ad-supported model has a lot to do with that.
maybe it isnt "elitist" but it is most definitely attended by the ELITE. Sayings that $10,000 attend a conference is anything but expensive is being elite.

Just deal with it and roll on already. Let's face it, only the BEST speakers doing all sorts of things are invited to speak at TED.
Agreed. Any software engineer knows it shouldn't take much more than 1 second, tops for a number to be incremented in one computer and decremented on another, separated across a network. Roughly speaking. Now add in fudge factor to account for a long and possibly unreliable network path (the Internet cloud, or similar private banking inter-network) and for the need to perform an atomic and 100% bulletproof and auditable transaction, and we can envision a scenario where the total latency between when the request is made and when the deal is done and put to bed as say 1 day, tops. And that's being very generous on implementation complexity assumptions. So when I hear things like 3-5 days, a week, 2 weeks, that's getting into insanity land. I smell either really old skool legacy systems in terms of process and hardware capabilities, or, something fishy like a sneaky way to allow the middle-men to earn "carry interest", or whatever, during that bloated time gap. Possibly also some government regulation which adds an enforced, artificial delay. But in terms of what are the actual minimum technical requirements to carry out that task, a few seconds would be generous, an hour would be padded and a day's wait would be bloated to hell. I could even say a day if each bank wanted to run all transaction requests as a single batch performed nightly, with human auditors being able to look at reports both the day before and after to "sanity check" results. But again, that should cause a 1 day delay at worst.

I am not a banking programmer, so take with grain of salt. Perhaps there's some evil super-complex-and-unavoidable issue at play, but I doubt it.
Tell HN: Productive.io & Action.io for sale
Anyone want them?
"consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s"

Is it just me or is that comment just a tad childish? I'm finding it hard to take this guy seriously, let alone the other guy.
> check out the GoF book

Oh dear God, that's the last thing he should do. That book is so incredibly dull. It makes Death Valley look like a lush rain forest.

Might I suggest Head First Design Patterns [1] as a good introductory alternative that won't sap his will to live.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/First-Design-Patterns-Elisabeth-Freema...
I'm pretty sure that was his point - I think it's widely known that breast cancer gets a lot of attention despite, as that table shows¹, not being more prevalent in those places than prostate cancer (indeed less risk of developing breast cancer in the table: 1-in-8 vs 1-in-6). Breast cancer does have a marginally higher mortality rate in those figures though (both are listed as 1-in-36 die).

--

1 http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerBasics/lifetime-probabili...
You'll want to pipe it into `aplay -r 64000`. At least my copy of aplay incorrectly guesses the rate so you have to tell it.
Ask HN: Non-social media startup, 40+ founders seeks support and funding
Greetings,<p>When I asked a friend of mine to introduce me to the folks at Y Combinator, he essentially said that I'm about 20 years too old, and way too experienced, for Y Combinator. Further, I'm not doing social media, mobile apps, HTML5, etc - another strike against me. After reading through Hacker News for awhile, I'm inclined to agree with him.<p>Are there Y Combinator like environments for high tech startups working in other spaces? (ediscovery, in our case.) I've submitted to Angel List but am interested in seeing if there are other opportunities.<p>One major issue is that I moved out of the Bay Area three years ago to Central Illinois. I'm wondering if I need to move back for a few months simply to get access to the in-person opportunities.<p>Insight would be welcome.
Huh? You want to ignore all factors relevant to the question except one (school quality), I try to introduce a second factor, and I'm oversimplifying?

Please go look up the definition of "simple".
Great job! This could definitely be useful to find something people already want, especially if you could keep a tally of the most wished for ideas. What did you develop it in?

I also like the logo of the two birds talking. Did you make it yourself, or did you get it from somewhere?

One thing that I see could use a little improvement is the "next" and "previous" links. Right now they just blend in to the background. You should try making them stand out, and maybe make them look a bit more button-like. It would also be worth testing "next" and "previous" links on the top of the content.
I like mathematica for stream-of-consciousness type stuff. Personal notes rather than something I'd publish. I can code up some functions, try a few things, show the important results, and talk about it with typeset equations all in the same printable page. Latex input would be nicer, but it's not terrible once you learn some of the keyboard shortcuts.

Matlab seems an odd thing to ignore. It's pretty good for doing more computationally intensive work. It's not fantastic, but it gets the job done and has good plotting features. I generate a lot of publishable figures with matlab.

I've done some simulations using Fortran, and it's surprisingly good for a language it's age. It's been continually updated. Legacy features occasionally bite you in the ass. C is for drivers. I use it in the lab only when forced to.

So, what does Haskell offer? It looks nicer than C. Can I write drivers for odd-ball devices in it? Probably. Then again, I'm often just modifying some C-code from a vendor, so the choice is already made for me. Fortran is so well entrenched that I'm still going to wind up using it if I ever want to run something through some crazy hydrodynamics code somebody else already wrote. If I want to do stream-of-consciousness type stuff I'll still be using mathematica. How is it at plotting things? Probably not very good since it wasn't worth mentioning.

Sounds like another language I'll learn if I'm forced to.

If you really want to make this physicist drool the single best thing you can do is give me a development environment that combines rich plotting features and Latex input for comments. NOBODY HAS DONE THIS!!! Put a pleasant to use language under the hood and you might have a winner.
Yes. Is that a problem? I don't know. I am not elite so I am excluded. I do not like being excluded, I do not like feeling that I am less than someone else so I do not like TED's elitism. I like the videos though.
Melbourne college may give iPad to every student
Bingo. This is why it smells like something fishy. Like the banks are trying to earn carry/float interest. And possibly the government is in bed with them, by adding some regulation to impose an artificial delay, to supposedly add safety/caution, but in reality to give the banks cover to earn more profit on this carry/float interest. This is my best thumbnail theory, anyway.
Google launches counterattack on malware with fixes and “remote kill”
Has the market price dropped for sex?
That was exactly the point where I stopped reading -- upvoted.
Most of them are gone.
It's a product with very little traction and an inferior experience to what's already in the market(twitter, fb).

Unfortunately pockets of traction for a product as old as Buzz means very little. Social for big guys like fb and google is about scale, not niches.
And even if you aren't a java programmer, there's probably an implementation of your language of choice written for the JVM, which might work on AppEngine. Clojure definitely works, and I think JRuby does as well.
This is bad, its basically giving Facebook ownership of a sites content. It maybe good for pulling in users but there is no such thing as a free lunch. I'd be cautious of implementing this as it increases Facebooks value by decreases the value of sites that use it. They loose control of the data and become forever tied to Facebook.
"There is no such thing as free TV or a free lunch," said Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a cable trade group. "It's expensive to run a broadband network, and I wanted to make sure my companies were able to experiment with new business models."

Running a broadband network is expensive, but telecom's charge subscription fees to pay for that. If they are subsidizing their internet with their cable profits, then that's obviously not long-term sustainable. If they aren't, then this statement is BS.
The inofficial EuRuKo 2011 waiting list
i thought orkut was google's facebook clone?
I wish I had the design chops to create a graphic of that quality...

I got it from http://iconfinder.com/. You can find lots of great graphics there for free (don't forget to check the licenses).
The iPad Is The Only Camera With A Lower Resolution Than Its Display
Two myth 3's?
How much? Where'd you register them?
I'm sure they have a list of email addresses that have paid for Tweetie (or the ability to acquire it). Given this, it seems possible that they could do something to disable it in the app.
Hi back!!
Strangely, it's not just him, though I agree it doesn't seem particularly likely to be true. The journal's editorial board seems to have people who do reasonably respectable work when it comes to their work that doesn't involve panspermia. The journal's editor-in-chief, for example, is a well-respected director at Harvard's observatory, and his "normal" papers (reporting on finds via the telescope) get published in normal journals.
In production use, we found we could run double the load on our servers with 1.9 than we could with 1.8. Switching to 1.9 kept us running our app on a cluster of 8 servers as our user base grew, saving us the monthly rental of 8 servers and the overhead of running twice as many web servers.

We never measured how much longer our tests took to run though, since our customers were only ever running in Production mode
I can recommend a great little book about this kind of thing called "Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds".

Here's the US Amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/Turtles-Termites-Traffic-Jams-Explorat...
"conversations are truly the only way in the world is changed, not technology"

No. Action is the only way things get done. Ask anyone waiting for the Army Corp of Engineers to get a plan done to relieve flooding. Lots of conversations, but no action.

Right now it is TED, later it will be the opposite complaints about SXSW (why are these people here?). I seem to remember a quote by one of the owners of Studio 54 about the only way they got in was to own the club.

It still seems, online at least, there are a lot of experiments in social networking in this area that could be the basis for someones software.
Android job openings overtake iPhone for first time
do you mean xenobiotic?
ahh.... KA9Q, I remember it well. Was one of the first internet programs I got to work.
I spoke at TED this last week. While it was one of the most inspiring things I've ever attended, I was somewhat underwhelmed with the age demographics represented. There were maybe 10 people under the age of 25 (I'm 22). On one hand it kind of exposed the inherent agism expressed in the valley that I was/am accustomed to, on another hand it was frustrating that it seemed as if I was somehow a young'n hanging out with the adults, and on yet another other hand it was inspiring to see people who have worked on one thing their entire lives and stuck with it until they've changed the world (whereas in the Valley so many people want to make their FU money and sit on a boat for forever).

It's definitely elitest in the strictest sense, but you have to realize that a lot of the people (at least the speakers) have passions that they have pursued not so that they could one day speak at or attend TED but because those ideas actually matter a lot. The opportunity to attend TED is a byproduct of pursing your passion, which is infinitely more important than infinite snacks, gift bags full of stuff or even getting to meet your heroes (I met Jeff Bezos).

Unrelenting passion will get you farther than any ticket to a conference will. The lucky ones are not the ones who get what they want (like a ticket to TED), the lucky ones are those who get to do what they are meant to do (who change the world for the better).