skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A recursive treehouse sounds like an idea worth trying.
I think Moki.TV just redefined 'polarizing'. If you look at the individual bar graphs for each movie (especially the ones on the top right of the main graph), the voting distribution is actually very even ('square' or 'sloped' looking). For the data to be truly polarised you would expect the graph to be U-shaped: lots of 5s and lots of 1s and little in between.

What this data shows is that lots of people are giving these films a chance (and paying money to do so) who aren't really that engaged with the genre, or niche. That's a big validation of the studios' design strategy for the films.

An illustrative example I can think of that isn't in the top 20 is District 9: a very familiar 'niche-y' core genre, a fairly predictable plotline, but with enough influences from other genres to keep a diverse audience interested. The Dark Knight would probably be another.
Apple has never competed in the bargain basement.
> not exactly what you'd call "safely" manufactured for an existing fanbase.

I'd say a film having a budget of $22k[1] is pretty safe, as far as the rest of the films on that list are concerned. While not a non-trivial amount of debt for a handful of people to take on, it's roughly in the same price range as a new car, which most people are capable of taking on.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project#Budget
Can I ask why? I'm really curious, I don't believe I know anyone who has ever switched back to Windows from OS X. I use Win 7 at work and OS X at home, and while Win 7 is the best version of Windows I've ever used (and I started on 3.1), it's no match for OS X.
In some cases, yes (flickr, delicious, etc.)

If you're implying that Yahoo's MO is to acquire companies and convert them into pumping out hum-drum, mediocre software, well, that sounds about right.
All depends on use case. I'm surprised that hackers here who have to type , see multiple windows on screen, etc. could make such a replacement.

A $500 tablet certainly can't replace my $400 (used) laptop.
http://twitter.com/#!/karaswisher/status/40195515840729088
Can you dump some ping times? 2-4s is waaaay outside of what I'd expect the average response time to be.
Advogato investigated the problem of transitive trust networks pretty thoroughly as I recall. Anyone here able to comment on how they turned out?
IMO you should count the time you would want an employee you were paying to count. If you are giving 100% of your focus to thinking about solving a problem for a client, you should count it. If you know you're not giving it the work the attention it needs, you shouldn't count it.
Awesome. However, you said this is a "startup". How are you going to monetize this besides the obvious (ads)?
both forks typically end up poorer because of members lost.

I strongly disagree. Off the top of my head: XFree86/Xorg, Mozilla/Firefox, Debian/Ubuntu, Rails/Merb... these were all cases where the existing community had calcified in some key area and a fork was necessary to create a space where important work could get done.

And in most of those cases, not only was the fork stronger than the trunk in (some) specific areas, the fork actually led to the trunk getting stronger. Not only were patches merged, but entire projects, community values, development practices, etc were.

XFree86 is an exception, but organizational paralysis was what necessitated the fork, so it's not surprising they were also unable to respond to the fork.

But I just don't buy your notion that forking is somehow unhealthy and destructive. It's one of the most valuable ways we have to keep open source code, ideas, organizations and practices fresh, healthy, and vibrant.
Internet Access Should be Application-Agnostic
Ask HN: Library to pretty print JSON?
I feel like I am in Google Hell right now. Why is there not a readily available library that I could call to get a clean, pretty printing of my JSON return output within the browser.

The only thing I have stumbled across is:
http://www.cerny-online.com/

While it seems to do what I want, it looks for too chunky and complicated just to get some formatted JSON. Call me lazy, but a good old git clone and a function call would be nice.

Is there some buried treasure out there somewhere or do I need to write my own?
there should be a "inform the fbi about your torrent site" template. no wait, i guess they dont need it now.
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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145 He had an extra slash in his URL
Wait... he complains on his post about not submitting his blog posts to the community.. which then gets submitted to the community and upvoted (albeit probably not by him). Does that sum it up?
> Between the small, crowded, pothole-filled roads

Well, the wide ones have potholes too.

> buses which are never on time

I wouldn't say "never"...

> Steelers football fanaticism

well, yes...

> the weather is terrible

Wait, what? I'll tell you what's terrible. Bright, sunny days all the time are what's terrible. Downright depressing if you ask me.

> I absolutely cannot wait to move away from here

Some people just don't like "livable". Go figure.
I see that too. I keep hearing time and again from investors like Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon that amid the difficulty of attracting and retaining good talent, the "unicorn" is the killer product person.
Another formulation:

"What system can allow a site to absorb N new users without causing regression to the mean, with the constraint the membership is open?"

I'm pretty sure the answer is: no such system exists.
It's simple really. Digg was good, then it got popular, Reddit was good, then it got popular. I've increasingly visited HN more than Reddit to get my old Reddit fix, as I assume others have, and so popularity has increased and now the quality is degrading as people want their karma fix or 2 cents.

There should be a brainstorm on this. I'm starting to realise I want comment submissions from well known or quality submitters. Not just your average kid or someone who is trying to troll.

The other issue is one-off opinion pieces on some guys blog. HN feels like every programmers chance at 15 mins of fame. Why Ruby On Rails is X times better than this (adudecodingblog.com), My way of speeding up Python (pythonlover.com), etc. having someone like pg, of Joel, or big wigs viewing items or articles like these, offering actual real world advice, and providing comments.

Maybe a subscription based hackernews, where the kudos goes to the legends of the industry, interns are made, and I get my intelli-fix and boredom disguiser because I'm stuck in a cube-farm polishing PL/SQL wondering how the hell I got here and when can I play that stupid COD:Black Ops with its really crappy hit detection. Why do I keep playing it?! Why haven't I asked for a bigger paycheck? Why am I not contracting? How is it that the kid I use to teach programmer is now earning more than me? Oh well, keep surfing...
Maybe some mix of karma, account age, and the number of upvotes received from first-year members to give a person's votes weight.
How to make better friendly wagers
The long-term goal is to have a subscription service that tracks performance issues. There are other possibilities, like ads, referral programs, consulting, etc..
Is this verifiable? Is there extra information on your magnetic strip? Could you not just push the same signal as the credit card numbers into the iphone's microphone jack?
Spam filtering is still required in this case, by definition: potential clients and spammers are not disjoint sets. Any completely unknown sender who sends you a message has no metadata attached to their message which may enable trust rating; therefore, the only thing you'll be able to judge them on is the quality and relevance of the message content itself.

However, assuming ubiquitous identity servers, of the kind Diaspora is trying to enable, each identity server could be subscribed to a feed of updates for a respective channel key. So, for example, you could have an identity server at work from which other employees could pull your current "work" channel key, or an identity server at a hackathon meet-up from which other people who came to the meet-up could pull your current "meet-up" channel key. Then, people who contacted you would be contacting you with the trust score of the identity server pre-applied (you'd assign your work identity server a high score, because only employees may be members, while the meet-up score would be lower because anyone could show up and sign in, etc.) If you only want to deal with people you've physically met, you can just draw a line saying to discard messages below a certain trust score, and be done with it.

If not, though, channels are still a helpful complement to spam filtering, as each channel could have its own spam filter trained on channel content—so something that would be perfectly fine in a "work.offtopic" channel would be considered spam in a "work.ontopic" channel. Because people would likely have multiple means of contacting them (you'd have access to most people you actually knew through multiple channels), individual channels could be much harsher about rejecting content—probably just silently discarding it for everyone but the sender, and either acknowledging the rejection to the sender, or just saying nothing. (If clients sent a message to all relevant channels simultaneously, and messages from different channels with the same ID were re-combined for other clients, this wouldn't be so much of a problem.)

Any extension to this concept would simply be sticking an identity server in a new place: one sitting on each person's phone or computer providing temporary access to a "proximity channel" that constantly shifts (so as soon as you go out of range, you're unsubscribed from the identity server and can no longer send messages), topic-oriented free-to-join identity servers (basically equivalent to IRC servers, except that they don't have to handle message routing themselves), and so on.
This may also explain why even older members are posting things further away from the core hacker news topics. Something about health care or law or economics might seem more interesting than a pitch a VC article because we have all read many many opinions on the latter.

I think good technical stuff though is evergreen because there are always new languages, libraries and techniques.
I think one thing most women want is something emotionally gratifying. (I believe this is why rock stars get laid so much: Their songs meet some of those emotional needs in women that lots of men are so bad at meeting.) I think that is part of what typical "girly" loves like kids, pet cats, and "pretty" things have in common: They serve emotional needs rather than practical needs. If you can figure something out that serves an emotional need and a practical need for women, that's probably billionaire territory.

You know the saying: Men give love to get sex, women give sex to get love. If you can find a way to sell lurv, you will be in very tall cotton.

(Please note that I am female and not "talking trash" about women at all. Thank you.)
Awesome, thanks for the suggestions :)

Gomez is probably the largest competitor. They do a lot of enterprise sales, which isn't something I'm planning any time soon.
Lest you thought they had changed their ways.
http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/75-how-not-to-design...
pg@ycombinator.org, I believe.
The Python standard library's "pprint" pretty-prints data structures...it might work for JSON, since it looks basically the same (though I've never tried).
Wow great! http://hackerslide.com/data/2010-10-15-05.json appears to be the earliest.

Do you provide this as an "api" and allow people to build apps on top of it? If so, are there any limits?
http://code.google.com/p/jsonview/ for firefox.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ddngkjbldiejbhei... for chrome.

There is also a website that does a decent job as well http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/

All very nice viewers mate.
Wait? Why didn't Square increase their fee to 30%? I hear that's all the rage!

P.S. Thank you Square! I will be (as always) recommending this to my family members who run their own business where a large portion of their revenue comes from trade show sales.
Show HN: Romulist - Monthly Reminders for Forgetful People
Made this little reminder app for my girlfriend after she forgot a car payment. You give it a list of events, the days-of-the-month they're due, and the number of days you'd like to be notified in advance. Every day, it goes through the list, checks each to see if you haven't done it yet for the month and if the current day is w/in the window you specified. If true to both, you get an email. If you don't mark the event as done, it rolls over to the next day, so it won't forget even when you do.

I realize this is "just another calendar app," but I think that pestering/nagging feature is pretty cool. When paired with SMS interactivity instead of just email, I'm hoping it could be something pay-worthy... but I want to see what people think of it before I build that functionality.

Anyway, I'd LOVE to hear what HN thinks. Cool? Not cool? Already done 1000x before?

Currently in private beta, but here's a super-secret invite URL for HN: http://romulist.com/invite?code=hn
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Bungie.
Another HN challenge... as discussions get longer (like this page), it gets more chaotic and more difficult to follow.
I have an Omnia 7 and (to my relief) the update installed without a hitch. So it's not affecting all handsets.
No. At least, no more API than what I just explained ;-) It's not my data. It's publicly available because the main http://hackerslide.com/ site uses it and if you want to grab it every now and then, that's fine by me.

If anyone grabs the same file over and over or anything crazy like that, they'll be blocked, but if you just poach the data and store your own copies, go for it :-)
What features does OSX have that Windows lacks? Assuming a user that doesn't really interact much with the terminal. To me unless your a developer I can't see much that would really drive a decision one way or the other. Can't think of anything that either Windows or OSX makes impossible that the other does.
Can you live there without a car?
Just wow. Fire the entire mobile division and get out of the market; you're cursed and/or hopelessly incapable of executing properly on anything in the space.
Totally agree. After I cut my cable cord, the only thing I miss is live sports event. If this deal goes through, Google TV will become more attractive.
Or he had 929857 commit's and then he randomly sampled an equal number for each language. Thus, no division etc.
Yep. I do bike a lot because I dislike the bus, and they're never on time.
I like it! It's nice and fast and comparable services make me wait in a queue before receiving a report.

One issue is that I'm going to forget about your service by tomorrow. I only optimize my website when I make significant changes to the design or template, which is just a handful of times per year.

It would be nice if there was some kind of hook that would remind me about your useful service in the future. Maybe if you were able to detect when I change my website layout or add a javascript widget, you could send an email notification like "we've detected some changes in your website, visit us again to optimize page load times."
The sting is even worse when you have invested time and resources already.

This is why they say release early and release often. Try not to fret too much. At least you didn't spend tons of resources on an iOS app to have Apple change the terms of service in a manner that you can't comply with. Sucks to be those guys.
Something Awful and Metafilter both charge money to join.
Something Awful is pretty awesome...but is double-sided. The people from Something Awful are the same people who founded 4chan. ADTRW (Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse) is one of the boards of Something Awful and they were the first people on /b/ the day it opened along with 4chan and have set the bar to where it is since.

They are basically a grown up 4chan...amazing things like Copenhagen Suborbitals http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ but aren't all pretentious and srs business like Hacker News likes to pretend it is.
The JSON reference implementation [1] does this with JSON.stringify.

[1] https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js
Ecologies of Judgement
Years ago I developed a custom CRM for a client that included reminders. While testing the production version of the system pre-launch, I added many fake reminders, for users who happened to be real, along with a lot of other test data. I then cleared all of the test data...except I accidentally skipped the reminders table.

For weeks afterwards, my clients would receive profanity-laden reminders, helpfully labeled as "from Adrian".

Luckily, they had a good sense of humour about it. But since then, I've never used profanity in any kind of test data.
Ask HN: How to avoid working in all-male work environments as a programmer? 
My last three jobs have been all-male work environments, give or take minor contacts with women from time to time.

But I'm getting tired of it.

Any suggestions on how to find a programming gig where there is at least a possibility of encountering a person of the opposite gender from time to time?
Flash-based solid-state drives nearly impossible to erase
looks great, but the trailer covers the SD links.

(Chrome, OS X)
DropZap 3 gameplay video (upcoming game with diagonal mirrors)
Webpagetest is useful - it's the best place to get an IE speed report. The reports can take a while to generate, though.
Any HN readers experiencing these problems first hand?
Well, based on what I've seen so far, PG usually asks for datasets that support the point that one is making about the degradation of the community. If the essays that you have are just long rants, they will be easy to ignore. However, if there exists a dataset that supports those various points, as well as suggestions on how to change HN, PG usually seems very reasonable about trying them out.
Maybe you could have some helpful presets to present some results quickly i.e.

- 18-24 year old male looking to go nuts <click here>

- adventurous couple with young kids <click here>

- boring, retired couple who are scared of ethnic food <click here>

I filled out the profile for Asia and got Bali - which is full of Aussie tourists drinking and surfing but I specifically wanted no night-life/partying/prostitution. Somewhere like Phuket, Koh Samui, Boracay would have been better fits in my opinion. I guess with more data points the accuracy should improve over time.
It's worth noting that this is also true in Magazines, where they have strong editorial review, and an actual staff of people creating content.

Once you've read 12 months of Runners World, you've basically read every Runners World that has been, or ever will be, written.
I am seriously considering pruning branches, not just leaves of the social graph to keep communities healthy.

I.e. if you invited a bunch of bad apples, you will be pruned too. I have no idea if it would work, but it's pretty obvious that open social graphs beyond a certain threshold are not conducive to high-level discussions.
It's sad that it isn't openly licensed.

http://groups.google.com/group/silversmalltalk/browse_thread...
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download's going slow, the ms server is probably getting hammered. is there a link to a torrent that's not one of the pesky SP1 betas?
Movies used to be the only game in town; now there are actual games and the gaming industry surpassed Hollywood a while back. Besides, blockbusters have always been profitable, but with so many other entertainment options these days, viewers have choices they didn't in the past.

That Michael Bay movies continue to make big bucks is a travesty, but that's today's market. I'd much rather watch Man from Earth than any movie he's ever made, but one can't deny his movies make execs lots of money by being dumb and going for every cheap laugh, big explosion, overdone effect he can think of.
On an LG (on AT&T) and the update is not available.
Great idea. Great name.
The fact they use a hushmail address for contacting them made me actually laugh out loud.
I had roughly this same experience with buying VMWare Fusion two years ago. Nice to see they're paying attention to customers.
If I'm not mistaken, doesn't the NBA have its own TV network called NBA TV?
+1 for http://www.webpagetest.org , it's probably one of the best if not THE best performance testing webapp on the web. I've been using it for a while and it's just amazing. I love your Academy section, as well as the simplicity of the site landingpage.
Viewers yes, but I need something that takes the JSON returned from an AJAX call and gives me a nice view of it. So it needs to be something I can call through an API or locally.
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The site-specific search examples cited in the blog post are just about the lamest possible implementations of this API. I'd like to see things like an implementation of the built-in Bash commands, but mapped to various Web-centric commands:

ls: Parses the current page and lists the links.

cd: Change to another directory or page on the current site, relative to the current page.

history: Show the user's history.

source: execute a given JavaScript file in the context of the current webpage.

alias: Creates a new bookmark with a keyword shortcut.

export/echo: Set/echo JavaScript variables on the current page.

[...]

Actually, now that I've taken the time to write that out, I may just write this extension myself rather than wait for someone else to do it.
This is the exact question I was going to ask.

I've always used Pingdom and YSlow. I would consider spelling out the differences so users know what your USP is.
Oh no, wtf is professional terminology, cannot remove.
Would it be possible to show sites that scored in the same range? The site I tested garnered a score of 100/100. How is that score calculated? There must be sites served faster/better than mine - who are they? Also, how about a "Top 10" list of fastest, slowest, etc?
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At what point does a webapp become "ambitious" and not suited for PHP? What about PHP with a framework such as, e.g., Cake? I'm curious because I'm embarking on a project and probably choosing Rails over Cake, but only because the other developer is a Rails guy.
That's interesting. The conventional wisdom I've seen and read is that multi-threaded servers are generally more buggy and harder to reason about than using a single select loop with callbacks. Callbacks are more difficult to maintain state with, but they don't have race conditions and locking issues.

I agree that if you can get coroutines in your language, then perhaps that's the ideal path to take.
Pretty soon you guys will be telling the kids to turn down that damn music and stay off your lawn :)
That was my thought too, they both have quite stringent moderation, but that doesn't solve the increasing the quality of participation, unless of course it's decline is what drove some people away.