skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really depends. The survey is an interesting method of filtering people in of itself, to assure they'll use the service AND it has the added bonus of giving you some free market research. However, you don't want to be too intrusive at the risk of pushing people away.

Frankly, I think you'd be more than fine if you let it be on a first come, first served basis, with the added caveat of garnering a little market research. That way you're not turning away too many people.

You run the risk of taking on a lot of work if you start filtering everyone. And if you do that, you may miss out on a potential market you hadn't identified previously. Just a thought :)
Tell HN: I just heard breakupnotifier pitched by a radio DJ in WI
Station was 104.9 in La Crosse, WI on my way home after office hours. Note that http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2243650 was posted 1 day ago. I know we all now live with the reality that anything could be known by the whole world at any moment, I just didn't think I'd be hearing on the radio about a product that launched on HN the day before.
The slideshow is a must see.

Especially this OGG Video trailer. It's pure joy. http://www.designmadeingermany.de/#a25
Did they actually come up with a technical solution? Or did they just wave their hands at the ISP's and say, "we passed a law, you figure out how to enforce it!"
As the guy who wrote the article, I agree with your point on the magic URL — in an ideal world it wouldn’t be like this. However, it is now too late. /favicon.ico has been the de facto standard for a long time and the HTML spec explicitly mentioning doesn’t really make much of a difference — it is really just standardizing what is already generally supported.

It’s time we stop complaining and start embracing this part of the URL layout as if it was robots.txt we’re talking about.
It doesn't really matter what strategy you have, as long as you've agreed on a strategy beforehand. In the past, we've done coin flips, even/odd pepperonis on a pizza, rock-paper-scissors, even a ping pong game. Another alternative that I'm fond of is to have a disinterested third party to be a tiebreaker.
i'd say alter the list of swear words in general to a list possibly more tuned to programming. agreeing with above, word breakdown would be nice as well.

actually, maybe just a github swear browser.
Multiple Variants of Android Virus 'Hong Tou Tou' Surface in China
I heard today that the first iPad required FCC approval so keeping it under wraps was never going to happen. But that doesn't apply to the iPad 2.

I expect the iPad 2, if announced on March 2, to ship before the end of March.
Just because they dont manage every post does not mean they cannot check post to see the nature of their business intelligence. Just as PG does not read ever one of the articles and lets the user flag articles that are spam so can they use individuals to weed through the crap, by the nature of the job the person will be getting rid of the crap and only leaving legitimate posts, there is no value in weeding through the crap themselves unless they are going to pivot into a link spam software company. You are mixing the idea of the job of eliminating spam with business insight, the two are not linked and I still contend that wading through spam for a developer or owner is an absolute waste of resources for a start-up. Especially when a hire could do it for a 3rd of a developers costs.
This would be more interesting if it scanned comments from source files for profanity.
Relevant:

https://gist.github.com/198320

A one-liner I wrote that uses git blame to seek out who swears the most in a given codebase. Pretty fun.
It's code comments vs. commit messages, but the prevalence of profanity in the Linux kernel tree suggests developers' use of blue speech is pretty widespread.
Apple in talks to improve sound quality of music downloads: Does 24-bit matter?
This is an example of bad poor graphical representation. The proper way to do this would be to take the swear words per word for each language and then map this to a bar graph, then you could easily see which has the highest vs the lowest.

A pie chart is good for things that add to 100%. The number of swear words that occur in something is not appropriate for this type of graphic.
I think I'm going to fund my next startup on seomoz referrals!
That flow chart there is helpful, thanks.
Well played!

I wonder if this has anything to do with:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2247962

I know I plan to comment my python code a little differently now! Maybe that will help balance the numbers?

I know I'd be pretty vulgar if I programmed in C++/Javascript all day!
Pretty much, yeah. The first startup I worked at (corporate remote access) had half a dozen different services that a request touched before a connection could be established. The second (financial software) also had half a dozen to a dozen. The one I founded (casual game creation) had 4 different independent systems interacting, and never got to the point where it was productionized (I killed it because the prototypes indicated it wasn't a compelling business idea).

Google, of course, is in a class way above all those. I'm not sure if anyone actually knows how many services a single search hits now - perhaps some of the old-timers who're now VP level or above in search. The last public figures I was aware of were "hundreds of distinct services spread across tens of thousands of machines".

Most startups that actually do something useful require far more than a web frontend and a database.
You can watch Youtube from the loo. Win!
I always seem to come back to "Introductory Statistics With R".[1] It gives a lot of examples of how to do "the day-to-day stuff". Also, since, as the title suggests, the statistical contents are mostly (very) introductory in nature, it's really easy for me as a reader to decipher what's going on in each example- it's easy to tell which parts are specific to the example itself and which parts are generic to R, if that makes any sense.

[1] http://www.powells.com/biblio/65-9780387790534-0
That doesn't really change anything. GCD still uses a thread-based concurrency model, and it's no more or less affected by race conditions than pthreads.

Also GCD is relatively new to iOS, and not the only concurrency API in Cocoa, so yes many apps will still be using (and will continue to use) traditional threads.
Giving virtual goods physical features: Dokobots
Dokobots is a new iphone geogame that is a real life pokemon/treasure hunt. What makes this game's technology unique is it adds a virtual layer to the real world by forcing players to walk to physical locations to collect robots. It's built on top of Google Maps. These robots have physical characteristics, and can be dropped off where the user chooses or sent on flights all over the world for others to pick up.

What are your thoughts and reactions? Is this a new genre of gaming/game that improves on location based games?
It's the dominant phone on the market. It worked out well for them.
Question related to charging: Did you charge for the initial posts on there now?

I think the best strategy is to publicly advertise that you charge $75 for a post, but to get content up (and it looks like you have) give it away for free strategically (again, sounds like you're doing this).

Also, to make sales, tell potential posters that you'll put in an inordinate amount of advertising for their job to drive overall traffic.
Except that integrating any real world signal tends to introduce drift due to noise in the input signal. If you have a smartphone, try writing an app that does exactly what you propose; you'll soon find that it's impossible to get the "speed" to zero out. (Either that or you have to filter the data, which will cause other fun errors like your speed drifting toward zero.)
This is per commit message, which is mandatory in git, not occurrences inside the source of the project.

Perhaps PHP and Python has fewer occurrences because the employers of people that use Python or PHP are less likely to tolerate inappropriate language in the code.
Why not? As long as the sample is random and equal in size.
Even ignoring that which other commenters have pointed out, I simply don't buy it for one reason: that PHP slice is way too small.
Why are you giving potential customers an excuse not to use it every month? Are you basing this assumption on any real data? An obvious disadvantage is it could drastically reduce your revenue - Someone paying $10/month will remember to use our service regularly. Someone paying $10 for a one time use may find it expensive and even if they do not, may decide to go with a competitor the next time they need a survey.

Wufoo is in a similar business for the most part and are doing well with subscriptions.
Great little service. I found when I submitted an idea and didn't complete the pitch, the error screen doesn't draw much attention to what the error is. "can't be blank" is the same size/treatment as Name/Pitch/Tags.
Can I just say, I think the question above is probably the best question/comment here. It should/will make you think about your actual proposition. Nail it down to a few bullet points, and a story or two. You should be able to answer this question smoothly, and very convincingly.

Great design by the way!!
Interesting. I'd just been thinking about this. The last two new releases I tried watching were so bad that I couldn't finish either of them. I know this is only 2 data points, but they were both bad in the same way: they were completely predictable. That's something you commonly see in a declining medium. People recycle old ideas instead of having new ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spolia
Unfortunately, no. Studios still need to sell rights to local distributors that can do all of the local marketing (TV, print, billboards). The distributors want exclusivity in their country to ensure that their marketing dollars (TV, print, billboard) are recouped. If customers can simply get a Netflix membership after hearing about it through their local advertising, the distributor will lose money on their investment.
A related question, but slightly off topic: People who have worked on or built job boards, what do you think of a Shopify for job boards?

It seems that all job board shares 90% of the functionality, but the best choice is still to develop one from scratch. You'd never think of developing an online store from scratch anymore, but I don't think job boards should be any different. Then you'll get all the customization and metrics that Shopify gives you for products. I'm in the process of validating this idea.
Anyone know if this is using the 'unofficial API' (documented @ https://github.com/mislav/instagram) or if they've been granted access to the API beta?
Plancast comes to mind.

http://www.plancast.com
Although I agree with the statement in general, I have to ask: is polarization really a good measure of declining quality? With ticket prices these days, maybe a higher percentage of audiences are more likely to think it was good so they don't feel like they wasted money...

Either way, nice visualization and it's always fun to read catty reviews about bad movies.
F# on (Ubuntu) Linux with Mono and Monodevelop
15 cents is huge if you are only charging a few dollars per transaction. The Square reader is awesome for small merchants at farmer's markets and swap meets. Most of those transactions will probably be under $10.
Public-key channels over e-mail. Think about how your body works: each cell has certain receptors (a key) and only reads data from objects that are shaped to plug into those receptors. Thus, random messages can float around in the bloodstream without every random cell trying to interpret them. Similarly, we could have an actual "inbox" (a bloodstream) that never gets displayed, and then channel-specific inboxes that are.

When a spammer begins to spam on a certain channel, a message can be sent via a secondary channel (maybe a special control channel, or just any combination of other known channels that hits everyone who had authorized access to the original channel) to automatically shift just the valid users over to a new channel, and discard the original. It could be completely invisible from a UI perspective, with the new channel retaining all the old channel's metadata.

The nice thing is that it's almost entirely compatible with all the e-mail infrastructure we have now, but also allows for a very convenient use-case if you're willing to switch to a new UI. The only problem is in people's current knowledge of, and access to, public-key encryption. If Facebook or another major identity provider started pushing people to send them public keys and set up a queriable API for them, that'd be a nice first step toward solving that.
Though that could be a lie to make you not know they are blocking you from looking at 'hire' websites.
Didn't know about tree-seq. Cool. I suspect I will find a lot of uses for it, now that I know about it.
When I ran it just said "5" :S
Great! A provisional patent application is a quick (and relatively inexpensive) way of obtaining a priority date of filing - to sort of 'stake your claim', giving you a one year window to convert to a full application, as I'm sure the attorney will tell you.

Indeed, the beauty of simple (and unique) things is that they often appeal to the markets big-time. How many times do we come across something really simple and cool only to kick ourselves: why did I not think of this?

All the best and God speed.
Not long ago, I got pulled over and discovered my proof of insurance card was out of date. I was able to use the iPhone app of my insurance company to load up a PDF of the most recent copy and prove that my insurance was current. The cop was amazed that I could do this. No ticket. :)
On even days it works in the future, and scales to 1000/i/ users. SimonW, well connected with the timelords, or Harry Potter... not sure which ;-)
Agreed. Ever go to a farmers market and run out of cash? That sucks. And Square is helping to fix that problem. Sure, some farmers might still prefer cash only (since the market entity usually already takes a cut off the top), but at least it gives farmers who aren't selling out of certain items the possibility of increasing their sales.

Other use cases??? Flea markets, artists, street vendors, school functions (fairs, car washes, etc.), fund-raising or charity things, paying a cover at a party or at an art/music venue, masseuses and the like, gambling debts and poker games... I could go on. One thing I'm curious about is whether Square forbids min charges or charge-ups the way credit cards do ("you owe me $100, but I don't want to pay the fee, so pay me ~$103 instead"). Not that they could really enforce it any better than credit card companies...
Yeah it's oddly disturbing. My thoughts are that they just don't care that much about life anymore to swear in their commits?
Pie charts have a lot of drawbacks, sure, but it's ridiculous that we're at the point now where the first (and highest rated) response to a pie chart is always a negative comment about pie charts, regardless how good or bad the pie chart is.

This one in particular is very clear:

C++, Ruby and Javascript have the most profanity. They're relatively equal to each other and collectively account for more than 50% of the swearing in commit messages.

C is next, with significantly less swearing.

C# and Java are roughly tied a bit below C.

Python and PHP have, comparatively, almost no swearing.

Was that really so hard? When the data is already subjective (what is and isn't a swear word) and intended almost solely for humor, do we really need more precision than a pie chart offers?

It is at best hyperbolic and at worst dishonest to say you "have no idea" how to interpret this. You have an idea. You just don't have precision.
I just signed up so we can sell our software at conferences. It's not something I'd ever considered doing via cash, because very few people carry $100+ in their pocket. Our products sell for $139-$999; even if we discount for these events, it's still too much to consider it feasible.
If it's legal, it would be awesome of you to make this commit message dataset available on Infochimps or something.
This is an older post, but it's a high quality one to read.
The things that first came to mind when reading this were domain name squatters and scalpers. Do I have the general idea?
Watching my TV shows while on the pot or in the shower has reduced my wasted time... productivity!
(like listening to NPR/PBS in the car)
I'm not sure if I'm reading the visualizations correctly, but thankfully, they put Christopher Nolan on there, so I can have a reference as to whose work is best. ;-)

I do have to agree with AndrewO though, there are many movies that I consider to be of the highest quality that I would consider as eliciting heavy polar reactions. Primer is perhaps the best geek example.
This article makes two huge assumptions:

1) Critical meta-ratings as THE measure of quality

2) The Top 20 popular movies per year as a representation of the entire year's quality.

The author's final result seems to be that movie studios prefer to make movies that have a built-in audience (at least for big-budget blockbuster movies).
I think I missed the part where the FBI wants to incriminate math. What are you talking about?
A place to SUBMIT Your TUTORIALS
Submitted a year ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124035 - although it garnered no comments, and only one upvote.
The Drunkenness of Nations
The 80s was the greatest decade for movies. Sadly I cannot prove that from this graph.
I expect the iPad 2, if announced on March 2, to ship on March 2.

Because that's the way Apple usually rolls.
If you consider a $600 vs $500 tablet credible.
I find the competing trends going on in the valley very interesting. It seems that there are still far more engineering-driven startups than product or customer.

Just last week I was visiting a startup where the lead engineer expressed outright disdain for product.

It'll be interesting to see which philosophy becomes dominant in 10 years.
No, that is how the system works. However, precedents can only go "downhill." From Wikipedia:

"a lower court must honor findings of law made by a higher court that is within the appeals path of cases the court hears"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stare_decisis

Given, this court may not have any lower courts, in which case you'd be right - albeit for the wrong reason.
That's kind of part of it though. It's a living, working institution. The best work is going on now. It's not a museum that people come and visit for historical purposes. Normally when something becomes a tourist attraction it's well past being a living entity. Intel and Apple are historic, but they're also well still alive. That's part of the energy of Silicon Valley.
In other news, those damn kids have it too easy these days, had to walk 10 miles, bare foot, in 10 feet of snow, up hill...

Sensationalist title and a data visualization that's useless. Try average Rotten Tomatoes score or something, not some random stat with no formula made up on the spot. Seriously, what does "polarizing" actually stand for?

This kind of thing has been going on since the beginning of time and will continue until the end of it. Sorry, nothing to see here.
Two things:

* I don't think polarization is a good signal for poor quality; I would rather suggest it means a more niche product, more highly focused. That the niche being served is largely adolescents is unfortunate.

* I think big-budget movies have been getting more conservative and predictable, but I would hazard a guess that it's due to financial industry turmoil and consequently less desire for risk taking.
Ask HN: Help with 401k & Savings
My girlfriend is asking me some questions about setting up her 401k and saving money for retirement... Unfortunately, my last job didn't offer it and my new one doesn't qualify until Oct, so I'm an amateur when it comes to retirement saving.

She's an RN and makes around $50k/yr right now at 26y/o. Her work matches up to 6% of what she makes and she currently puts away 6% of each paycheck, but is considering changing it because she's not sure if she's saving too little or too much. She's considering an IRA or something else as well.

She pays around $500/mo for student loans and doesn't have too many expenses outside of that (just phone, rent, etc).

My life is actually very similar and I'll soon have the ability to start investing in a 401k, so I figured I might as well learn about it now. What would your advice be on how much to put away (and where) for someone at this stage of their life?
Think there is a pretty significant component missing in analysis - more young people start companies. It could be that the success rate for older entrepreneurs is 3x of 4x that of younger - not assuming it is, but if young entrepreneurs are starting companies at 3x or 4x the rate of older, it might explain some of the anecdotal observations.
Given that O'Reilly books are of technical nature, and you can't actually code on an iPad (unless you're using SSH/VPN), this is a perfect fit for the O'Reilly... you'll need a computer anyway.

Furthermore, I'm never on vacation and think, Oh, I'd love t read up on RoR... I usually already have the book.
IP-TV Rebroadcaster ivi.tv Shut Down by Court Injunction
I remember reading an article a while back:

"Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light"

article:

http://www.universetoday.com/33752/device-makes-radio-waves-...

the paper it's based on:

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0405062

Anyone with a Physics background care to comment on the validity of this study?
How Borderline Douchebaggery Helps Land A Great Roommate
"That the niche being served is largely adolescents is unfortunate."

That is the power of the high school date movie crowd at work.
> iPad 2's release could still be months away.

Unlikely. Apple has moved just about all of its non-computer release cycles to yearly (iPhones have been yearly from the start, iPods have been slowly moved to the yearly September event). April at the latest.

And note that Apple has yet to announce anything (they probably won't announce the iPad 2 ever, they'll just go "hey here's the iPad 2" one day, as they generally do for product refreshes).
Anyone know how they created that really nice graph with the mouseovers, filtering, etc?
Well, once consideration mentioned by Linux adherents in the 1990s was that if Windows is all the people who make decisions about enterprise computing know, they will tend to block the use of Linux when Linux is appropriate.
A good weekend project would be to take an existing graphing library and make a wizard for it that would create a correct type of graph based on the data and your stated intentions with the data, as shown in the flowchart above.
He prolly means not a VM.
If you look closely at the graph, notice that while there are more poorly rated, highly polarizing films, there is also an increase in less polarizing, very highly rated films... They're just hidden because your eyes are drawn upwards to the red. If you only pay attention to the red, it's just a chart about polarization.
How to be a Twitter Guru
I wrote a post on my blog 4 years ago (!) with lots of examples of profanity in code comments.

It took a half-hour to write and has consistently gotten more traffic than the rest of my blog.

Ah well, give the people what they want: http://codeulate.com/2007/12/fcking-programming/
Why would extremely polarizing movies be an indicator that movies are getting worse? If anything, more polarization would seem to mean that critics are finding movies more difficult to come to consensus on, which could mean that movies are getting MORE complex and nuanced in their storytelling, which in tern could be taken to mean that movies are getting BETTER.