skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With 13 votes in less than an hour, I'm surprised that this isn't on the front page. Presumably some penalty is being applied, and I'd like to better understand this.

For hackers and many other people at startups, marriage is an important way of getting insurance coverage and other benefits. Until now, the US government has taken the stance that many people shouldn't be eligible for it. Now, it's changing the position. Why isn't this relevant?
For the next step I would love to see:

• A standard across multiple courses so that you don't have some courses publishing assignments and recorded lectures while others just post assignments.

• A new degree type. Not an associate's degree nor a bachelor's degree, but a lesser degree that could be earned completely online from a solid institutions like MIT.
On The Internet Nobody Knows You're a Lambda (re: Lisp web apps) [pdf]
it would be the first secure version of wordpress released
I'm for Gay Marriage but I think he loses some serious integrity points for this because he openly said he was against Gay Marriage during the campaign.

Beyond that the Justice Department's job is (by their own definition) "enforcement of the law and administration of justice". Not enforcement of the laws the current administration happens to agree with. The Bush administration did vaguely the same thing with Microsoft's anti-trust case but at least they bothered to make it look like they were still enforcing the law with a wildly insufficient plea deal.

Again my issue isn't with Gay Marriage. I'm just not crazy about sending the message that it's ok for the President to subvert the law and lie to the public to do what he thinks is right. Even if I agree with him.

(For those of a liberal bent who can't see past the Gay Marriage issue imagine a Conservative President deciding not to allow the DOJ to pursue states that outlaw abortion because he doesn't feel like enforcing federal law)
Injectable Computers
Hiring from a friend's company is a lot like dating a friend's old girlfriend. It can be totally cool on the surface but totally not cool underneath.
Libertarian has been diluted to meaningless.

These days, if you go by majority vote, it generally means "doctrinaire conservative who decided deficits were really important on January 20th, 2009".
Could it work as a browser plugin? And more generally, isn't it nearly impossible for FB or any other website to prevent plugins from accessing data as if they were the user?
China tells living Buddhas to obtain permission before they reincarnate
Oh yeah, add the unenforcability of non-compete agreements in California as one more factor in the success of silicon valley.
Ironically, the people with the strongest feelings are the people who least have to put up with it...

Perhaps knowing how things could be makes one more upset at how they are, in any situation (not just phones).
Is Apple planning on making an expansion at their Soho store?
Not everyone is "pretending that the problem doesn't actually exist." There are limited resources available to any and every organization. Many times, a proper fix can cost more than a band aid, sometimes even over time.

Here's a hypothetical, but not ridiculous, scenario. Which is a better way to spend resources? Track down and stamp out an extremely difficult resource leakage bug? Or simply bounce the server? The costs associated with the former may be HUGE. The costs associated with the latter may be small in comparison (cost of potential down time, minimal labor cost of bouncing the server(s), and costs associated with user reliability).

I wouldn't always chalk it up to whatever it is that your comment implies (laziness? willful ignorance?).
You're right, of course, and I meant my comment more rhetorically than it appeared.

From the point of view of a board of directors or senior mgmt, if outsourcing is such a good idea, why not outsource management? It would be more cost-effective, and just as efficient.
Clickable: http://www.weezic.com

1. What's with the name? It reminds me of two things: Weezer, the band, and Weezy, as in the rapper Lil Wayne. Neither of which have anything to do with classical music. But I'm no musician, so I might be missing a reference.

2. I'm no designer, but I think you have slightly too many colors on the home page. Try to limit it to no more than 5, total (including the background, borders, etc.)

Other design issues: the "become a weezician" shouldn't be in all caps, as the "Learn more..." isn't. On the same button, I'd reverse the colors; blue seems to indicate "You are here," but you're using it as a link.

3. I like the idea, but again, I'm not a musician, so my opinion means nothing. That said, the intro lines definitely need to be re-written.

Are you looking for a classical work to play?
For each work, enjoy instantly all the quality resources you need.

I'm not quite sure how to reword it, perhaps something like... "Classical sheetmusic at your fingertips."

It is a lot more polished than most beta-type sites though, so good work!
Sounds valid.
I'm currently working on a haml parser that supports coffescript. Would be awesome if the template logic would be agnostic.
I wasn't making a judgement about whether I thought it was spammy, but what I considered a more likely interpretation of the available data to be. I'm also lumping everything of the nature "does abide by Facebook's terms" in the "spammy" bucket.
Simply based on name alone it reminds me of my project Crumb: http://breefield.com/crumb/
> If you are rebooting your Mac for reasons other then system upgrade, something is wrong with your machine

Indeed; that is the point of the article. =)
Piracy once again fails to get in way of record box office
Ask HN: Why many kindle books are more expensive than hardcover ones?
Test automation is about preventing bugs, sure. And TDD is about software design. I don't disagree.

However, unit testing is also a nice way to find bugs. In any case, "trapping" a bug like I did in this article is often an effective way of introducing newcomers to what a unit test is.
If it was to stop working for a big company and to chart your own path, think about whether or not selling to a large company with a mandatory employment period (with serious consequences in case you break that contract) is for you at all.

Could someone give an example of a mandatory employment period with "serious consequences"? Most discussions I've had with people who have left early from a post-acquisition environment centered around forgoing their stock vesting or retention bonuses (to them, it was worth the loss). Assuming no one's breaking non-competes or NDAs, I'd be curious to hear what else is under consideration.
Oh, I remember why Phoenix got bumped as well. I started using it on the first release 0.1!

But don't forget, after Firebird, it was going to be called "Mozilla Firebird".

Oh, fun times!
Thanks for that clarification.

But the speed of light can only be measured relative to YOU

That's still wrong, though. The speed of light is an absolute; it's not My Speed + the Speed of Light.

The person I was who originally responded to me (ars) was trying to say that motion in space is impossible because it's always relative -- apparently even to the speed of light. That's not true; motion is relative to the speed of light, period. And what I had been trying to express (however badly) was that the faster you move relative to the speed of light, the slower you move in time.

I think ars was just in a nitpicky mood and was fixating on the particular wording I chose.
Hmm, nope. Solaris of some flavor I think.
Actually it's Linux Mint 10, but same Gnome setup :) (Also, Mint is just a slightly different wrapper on top of Ubuntu).
Always get a dotcom. Anything else is just asking for confusion, especially if you ever plan to market to non-tech customers.

That said, if it's just a webapp or something, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
> In theory, shouldn’t I find a nice cushy corporate job? I’m good at getting along with people, so I could probably nestle into the underbelly of a big corporation and make a ton of money without having to exert myself too much.

Wrong, wrong. You'll control much more your time if you're on your own. In a corporate environment, lots of people will pressure you. All by yourself, you just need to have the balls to not work more then 28 hours a week or whatever limit you want to set.
How to raise seed capital in Europe - "Secret" nr 1
Fundraising is not only a pitch – it’s also a process. It is a sales process.
I don't own a Kindle, but I still occasionally buy books in the Kindle store to read them on my iPad. I like the iPad for technical books and occasionally fiction. But reading on the iPad is slightly more straining than reading from paper, so for leasure reading I prefer paper.
Example:

If you're looking for "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" (that's a string of length 16) and you look in index 15 (counting from 0) and find a non-"a" there, you can leap forward 15 (or 16 - there's an off-by-one error waiting to bite) places. If that's also not an "a" then you can do it again.

It's more complex than that, but the complexity can, in some cases, be sub-linear.

There's another reference I have somewhere to a surprising (and contentious) sub-linear algorithm for something that's "obviously provably linear". I'll see if I can dig it up and post it later. No time now.

ADDED IN EDIT (because there's more than one reply saying the same thing)

Yes, it's futzing the constant. The point is that the constant can be less than one, it's not always necessary to examine every character in the string being searched, which comes as a surprise. But no, this is not sub-linear, although many people describe it as such. Knowing why it's not sub-linear, even when the constant is less than one, is an important milestone in learning about complexity of functions.
I think adversarial/zero-sum is the wrong characterization. There are clearly misaligned interests---companies want to pay less; workers want them to pay more. However, if both sides are better off under a match than they would be otherwise (which is why the market exists), then they'll try to match so long as the search costs, frictions and losses due to bad hires (i.e., adverse selection) don't swamp the benefits.

Imagine the worst case job market, which is that anyone can hang out a shingle and say "I'm a highly skilled Python programmer." Suppose 1/2 are good, and add value +1 to their companies, and 1/2 are bad, and "add" -1 to their companies if hired. If there is absolutely no way to tell before hand who is good and who is bad, then no one is getting hired---the expected gain from hiring is zero. We have complete market failure (this is the "market of lemons" example).

Now suppose you throw in some signals---schooling, resumes, interviews etc. if firms can tell w/ probability .8 whether someone is what they say they are. People now get hired, but even the good ones take a haircut b/c firms still wrongly hire bad programmers because the signals available--while better than nothing---are not perfect. I think SO is basically raising .8 to .95 (so to speak). This is valuable to firms and to workers and I can easily imagine a world where firms pay to get to .95 (and good workers pay to be evaluated with the .95 lens).
Political articles tend to get flagged, pushing them off the front page.
Show HN: Zone, my new productivity tool
Maybe that's how he formed his opinion? He spent years catering to the whims of 14 year old girls. It failed.
Check my thread announcing free geolocation API in case you need it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2255089
Facebook HTTPS: Is Done Better Than Perfect?
While I appreciate the skill in creating it, it does bring my macbook to its knees. Also a bit java applet circa 1999.
Yeah I'm absolutely implying something by my comment. I understand the time:value relationship and can expect some degree of RCA to go away if rebooting a server solves a problem for X amount of time, where X is less than a few days. But if you're spending the time opening an alarm, calling people to a bridge, agreeing to bounce a server, and then bouncing it, at some point that equation comes out in favor of actually doing some sysadmin/RCA and making it so you're not bouncing a server every 48/72 hours.

It also looks really JV to see those alerts day in/day out. Like, come on. We can't just fix the problem?
Meet Debian at CeBIT 2011
And keep your government hands off my medicare!!
That's probably a bit overstated. Many, many companies are completely dependent on the Microsoft framework or the Oracle/Sun framework, yet there is not an issue with that.

The bigger issue is they are dependent on frameworks that are still evolving at very high rates. Rapid changes brings a lot of chaos into the equation, which is dangerous from an investment perspective, but that same chaos can lead to unexpectedly strong results as well.
There was a commercial on Hulu a few months ago that I accidentally clicked on, which took me to a page (that probably used Flash, not HTML 5 canvas) that had a better ripple effect than this (almeros.com) page has. It was really sexy, but I do not know how to find it again.
Nice name playing both on music and "we", I guess more social functionalities to come.
Value proposition sounds pretty fair as one can get music sheets and play along tracks.
Content volume should be key to gain visibility and traffic.
Well polished beta for a beta! Cheers.
I'm starting to think there's some sort of conspiracy to keep jacquesm from leaving through daily submissions from his blog.
I was at the Genius Bar when a guy next to me got denied warranty work for having Cydia installed. It's quite irregular, to say the least.
I was with you up until "you should install these apps".. Wow is that gonna end up a disaster. Virus infection in 3..2..1
There is always someone who is pressed into service for this type of thing. It will happen as early as 5-6 staff members, and it doesn't go away when you hire an outsourced IT vendor. In fact it gets even more insulting.

"Thanks for spending 6 hours fixing all that stuff, I didn't want to spend $100 calling in the IT guy!"
We're definitely still here, but the newer guys have really stepped up for this release so they deserve to be highlighted. I think that's a great sign for the long term viability of the project. If 280 North were hit by a bus Cappuccino would no longer die, which it probably would have 2 years ago.
Creationists suffer defeat in Oklahoma
منتديات شيعة علي عليه السلام وفاطمة الزهراء عليها السلام
منتديات شيعة علي عليه السلام وفاطمة الزهراء عليها السلام
Ask HN: Tracking internal application metrics
I am developing a forum-like website that hosts unique types of conversations. The webapp is written in Django.

Google Analytics is used to track visits, pageviews, conversions, and all other client-facing data. I would like to complement that by tracking internal metrics like signups/day, avg comments / discussion, and so on.

Can anyone share tips or tools for tracking internal metrics? Right now, I am planning to implement the system myself or use django-app-metrics.
Would love to join you, but I won't be driving down until Friday morning.
Now this is an excellent reason and timeframe for doing periodic reboots.

It's basically a scheduled sanity check for your infrastructure. It boils down to robustness and assurance. If parts of your system won't survive a reboot this is an unknown and therefore a risk.

If a system can't survive a reboot it's better to find that out when it's during a scheduled reboot and personnel is on hand to deal with it rather than relying on on-call personnel responding to alarms from monitoring at some point.

Apart from the repair time being longer when relying on on-call technicians, there is also the general observation that productive systems tend to become more valuable or have more exposure over time as their usage increases. A failure at a later point therefore also becomes more costly as time goes by.
The Internet Wishlist - collection of ideas for apps people are wishing for
day of jacquesm?
Just asking, but how do you keep so many Chrome tabs open without things getting sluggish? My MBP (2008 pre-unibody/Leopard) seems to get bogged down with just a couple score of Chrome tabs.

Granted, I don't know much about what's going on under the hood (I'm a designer, not a programmer) but Activity Monitor shows that each tab uses a gig of virtual memory...
Rumors and news about features in Rails 3.1
I'm in the same exact boat at 29. As a result, I'm currently looking for partners who are under 26 and still covered by their parent's health insurance. The last thing I need my precious capital going towards is a booboo. It means I have one less thing to worry about. I've set aside monies just to cover my own.
Pricing information for Sony's NGP
I am a little more pragmatic about this whole thing, without HN I really wouldn't have realised the benefits of MVC, Memcached, JQuery, SEO, github, the options for charging for an app, Python, the concept of bootstrapping, timing attacks, how easy it is to become a contractor, incubators, even the realisation that you don't need funding to setup a web app. And many more that don't pop into my head now. It's made me a more confident programmer.

There is a lot to be gained in coming here and reading the blogs, the advice. Perhaps more from the comments. Admittedly there is a fair bit of noise and distraction too.

There are benefits as well as negatives, I think it's one of these cases of all things in moderation. I go to the occasional startup meetings and developers meetings near me for fun and relaxation, not because I think it will gain me riches. Because it interests me. Occasionally it motivates me (seeing Rob Wilmot (freeserve) and Joel Gasgoine (myonepage/bufferapp)).

While get it done and ship is a lesson I sorely need beaten into me at this last stage of development, I for one do not begrudge myself these distractions.
Why I'm I still seeing this thing around?
Why should Apple make it easy to jailbreak? That's spending development resources directly against their own interest.

That said, you have complete access to your own device, but you don't own the OS running on it. If you want to figure out a way to run Android or something else on it, you're absolutely within your rights to do so, but Apple isn't under any obligation, legal or otherwise, to make it easy for you.

As for Grooveshark, it's a shame for them that they're not on the App Store, but it looks like they were for a bit and then got DMCA'd for some reason. There's nothing particular about the app itself that is objectionable for the store, considering Pandora is up there just fine and it seems like they're the same kind of thing. Jailbreak+Cydia is an alternative, but again, it's not Apple's job to make it a viable one.
But the difference is they're not dependent on the Microsoft presence. If Microsoft ceased to exist tomorrow (localised meteor strike, let's say), the code running on .NET, Windows, etc. will still work. If Facebook is down, so are you.
Forrester Starts Coverage of Enterprise SEO Automation Tools
Wow, it's 2011 and this effect is now poorly implemented in the browser. Way to go, HTML5, way to go.
VimCasts: Undo branching and Gundo.vim
> they're perfectly fine with the fact that the Django Software Foundation has trademarked Django, a common Romani word/name?

Yes, because it's not confusing.

> I'd still be pretty upset if someone decided to trademark my name

It's very common for things to either be named after specific people, or to use names given to humans.
Answers from the Watson Team
-python

:)
IF Apple would then take care of marketing, payment, delivery and updating, people might actually use it. Developers would not like it, since Apple is providing these services for free right now, but the increased discoverability in the App Store might make up for it.
for what it's worth, the meat here is really only in jquery, backbone, and underscore. the rest is either redundant or preferential, no?

edit: downvotes welcome, given an answer to my question.
Ditto. Stylus looks great, and its in npm so thats a win. But Compass has the most watchers on GitHub and therefore I'd assume the most usage.

But all-in-all, awesome!
Groupon has had pretty huge revenue growth and is currently bringing in some hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue.

Skepticism about the ability to maintain that growth rate, and the suspicion of many (especially here) that they're burning bridges with the companies they work with put a high valuation in doubt, but that's a matter of opinion at this point. Evidence that Groupon is having any trouble finding partners to offer coupons is so far anecdotal.

I never thought there'd be this much money in coupons, but so far it looks like it's a great business model. It wouldn't shock me if those valuations were true.
> In theory, shouldn’t I find a nice cushy corporate job?

... where your outcomes are determined by currying political favor, gamesmanship, and your boss's shifty whims. Yeah, that's not a recipe for relaxing if you ask me. I'd also like my kids to view me as someone of integrity and not some sycophantic corporate douche.
The Slow-Motion Internet
I see SimpleGeo has updated their homepage a little, looks good and more informative. I never managed to understand what they actually were selling before. "We're making it easier to build location - aware services" - was it ever that hard?
Thanks for the ideas!

Re: posting -- I guess I would worry that the "attacker" would say that although the letter proved that I posted myself something on a given date, if the package was not tamperproof then it could have been anything.

OTOH the idea of filing a provisional patent sounds very plausible, albeit perhaps expensive.
Right, but these companies have lots of customers. They just get them from one place.

It's like renting a particular location: it's technically true that you could lose your lease, but that's only a risk to your business's long-term viability if your lease is artificially cheap (otherwise, you'll just move to another place on similar terms). And if your location is a particularly good deal, you should take it, even though losing it would suck.

Online, the same dynamic applies, but with lower transaction costs.
Brunch-Colors - a simple, addictive game made with brunch(Backbone,CouchDB)
And the success of silicon valley is one more argument to the pointlessness of non-compete agreements.
JQuery Waypoints - execute a function whenever you scroll to an element
How many of you planning startups would knowingly hire a pregnant woman as one of the first 5 employees?
Anonymous: Herd Mentality or Convergence Theory Driven?
Seems to me like it's the next logical step in their current cinema display/USB junction system.
Except for those who rely on Boot Camp for gaming. These people have to reboot whenever they want to switch from work mode to game mode.
Game Dev Story: A look into addictive game design
Simple, I choose job.
We will miss the open web.
While I agree that this particular demo is poorly done and doesn't really showcase HTML5 very well (see mr doob), there's a lot to be said for why it's important that it's running in the browser.

Pretty much every single computer that has a screen is capable of running this demo. Somewhere near a million new smartphones are being sold every day, collectively between the different platforms. Some of those run Java, some run Objective C, some run C#....

But they all run JavaScript.

All desktop computers, all laptops, all tablets, all smartphones...they all can run this demo. HTML5/JavaScript is much better poised to be "write once run everywhere" than Java ever was.
Writing Blazing Fast Infinitely Scalable Pure WSGI Utilities
Don Valentine talks about the Sequoia "R.I.P. Good Times" presentation