skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe this algorithm is also known as "precedence climbing", and it's the most common way to deal with operator precedence in a recursive-descent parser.
Blekko hasn't proven there is a market for it. They've got some interesting things going on, some good PR in tech circles and have raised some money but until they show revenue, profit and a sustainable business model, the decision on whether there is a real (or just imagined) market is TBD.
If you look into the history of high temperature superconductors (or any realm of physics where 'world changing' is in play... like fusion), it's full of quacks, frauds, overeager scientists publishing before checking properly, unrepeatable experiments, or just plain honest errors.
"I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too small to contain."
It has been many months so far and Digg, much like Reddit; changes daily. Both pride themselves on daily dynamic content. So to see people still going back when there's virtually no activity doesn't make sense.
An issue that we very much want to fix sooner rather than later.
I didn't read the same as the author in the e-mail. It seemed like a humorous comment.

Anyway, porting Vice from X to OSX shouldn't be a big problem.
I wonder how many lives have been saved by the iRobot PackBots -- I've visited the forward robot repair depots and seen them fix the obviously broken ones, and each of those could have been another customer for our hospital. Probably hundreds over the past decade in both theaters.
Oh No!
Most of these flaws are trade-offs, where if you fixed it, you'd create a worse problem.

This is most obvious in the ones where Danny's judgment itself may not match many of the readers of the article. For example, I love cached pages (as a user. As a Google dev, I kinda hate them). They've been so useful in cases where a website has unexpectedly gone off-line or becomes overloaded. But Danny's a publisher, and as such, each cache hit is one less pageview that his website gets. His interests are opposed to those of users, and Google, as the party in the middle, has to arbitrate between them. There's no right choice that will avoid pissing off one or the other.

Or take one of his LOVEs: "An end to overwhelmed product launches." A direct result of that has been that it's become much harder to launch things, and there is correspondingly less innovation coming out of the Googleplex. Every service needs to build for scale from day one, and that means that you have to pay that tax and iterate more slowly even if your service won't get any users. If a startup tried that, they'd never get off the ground.
Well you succeeded as far as I'm concerned. I like to tinker with GAE quite a bit and have ideas about hosting my next (serious) project on it, thanks for posting.
The root cause of every problem is that I don't fully understand my code. A debugger can only show you what the code happens to do in one particular scenario. The fear is that people are doing that and fixing only obvious mistakes as a substitute for static analysis and diligent review of the code leading to a correct model in their head of how it would handle any scenario. It's like declaring a bridge to be sound because you could successfully send one truck across.
Elance, Odesk, $$$
Radiation dose chart...

http://xkcd.com/radiation/
I'd be onto this in a flash if it worked on CentOS.
Parsing Expressions by Recursive Descent
True. My wild guess is that they probably already know the state of the fuel-pools from the helicopter flights - the roofs being blown off and all.

On the other hand, watching those Chernobyl documentaries is not exactly faith-inducing. Considering Chernobyl was one reactor going mad and Fukushima is what, four? I don't even want to imagine what those 50 guys are going through.
Time Management - XKCD Style
Stack overflow runs on a single DB server.

I think people really overestimate their data-store needs, and underestimate how much a big iron DB server can deliver.

Its probably worth thinking about scaling out on your data end, but until you start hitting some sort of limit on a 8 core 96 gig machine with server level SSD's its probably worth investing your time in other issues.
Does Paul Tyma maintain any blog(s) now? I just spent the last two hours reading his personal and mailinator blogs..
And sales people too...
What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial?
I'm the exact same way.....I've solved quite a few pesky problems with my code in the shower at the start of my day.

I've found that when I'm in bed trying to fall asleep is when I do a lot of brainstorming for my ideas rather than problem solving
Honestly I think both digg and reddit are on cruise control now. Don't get me wrong, I love reddit, but the leadership and passion are clearly gone, and it may not take much for the community to unravel itself.
Japan Status - crowdsourced radiation levels
Lessons From Chernobyl for Japan
Ah, thanks. A while ago I was interviewed by the SpiderOak team, who asked me to make a FAQ system with commenting and CAPTCHAs in Django to prove I could write code. This would only take one or two hours, but I've already developed countless web apps in Django so I felt rather bad that they wanted me to pass some arbitrary test before even talking to me (as you say).

I thought it was just me being a primadonna, but I'm glad to find someone else thinking the same way. After all, my resume (which is full of all the things they ask) should be enough for at least an initial impression on their part.

They never did bother to reply after I sent them the code. I actually now see that they have deployed a new FAQ system with commenting and CAPTCHAs, although it was simple enough that I don't think they'd just use my code.
Actually, I think you get a reputation for being a kick-ass game by having awesome gameplay and (when appropriate) a good story. Sure, looking pretty is nice, but I don't think graphics matter quite as much as the gaming industry thinks.
Stopped reading after the first page--Sites that separate their articles to different pages to increase their pageviews ughhhhhhhhh
It doesn't say anything about the PDF on the Amazon page, not that that's an excuse for Manning to be rude. Was it really an "FU" or just a polite "no"?

It looks like the page has been amended to say "The Joy of Clojure can now be pre-ordered from Manning".
I agree that she probably tried to sensationalize it. However, it is still an insightful read about lessons that can be learnt from Digg, if you can hold your attention long enough and look past the tabloid journalism elements.
Yep, shower too!
FWIW, this is the kind of thing I tried to pick out in my "Underrateds" HN feeds.

http://bconway.posterous.com/hacker-news-feeds-rolling-time-...
Show HN: We made a web-based cash register
http://www.whitemagicsoftware.com/software/climate/master.sh... ;-)
I have this challenge and I'm very interested in seeing how others solve this without using mocks. For my tests, I have 5 tests that rely on Twitter logins. Given that I run my tests ~10 times per day (on each commit), and other developers run my tests on their commits, I would have number_of_developers * commits_per_developer_per_day * 5 logins per day with a real twitter account. My guess is that that would run afoul of twitter's policies.

I'd love to see a web based stubbing service that would let me test against Twitter and especially Facebook without using real accounts on either.
Title should be prefixed with "Good news everybody: ".
When tracking was a good thing anyway?
I remember coming across the 3rd party cookie restrictions on Safari. I was setting a cookie inside of an iframe for its own domain since it was for internal state tracking for a check-in style button, not trying to set on the iframe's parent page or anything like that. Imagine my surprise when I discovered Safari even blocks 3rd party domains from setting cookies in iframes for their own domains.

For a moment at first, I was kind of frustrated. Then I thought about it and really, really was happy Safari was doing that. It might be causing me a little headache, but its also stopping lots of ad trackers right in their tracks.

This is something I wish all browsers would start doing.
Facebook does offer test user accounts (with an api) exactly for these types of scenarios http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users

I don't know if twitter offers anything similar.
Yes, but I didn't post that because of this quote, which led to my overall confusion: "The physical significance of the Planck length, if any, is not yet known."
It's not a bank in America, though it is in other countries. It's a registered money transfer agent in most states, other names in others. Regardless, banks that offer merchant accounts do the exact same things, so how would it be different if PayPal were a bank? They'd be doing the same things, stemming from the same Visa policies.
ELB load balances very easily across availability zones. In fact, that pretty much seems to be the setup they expect you to use. It doesn't allow you to balance across regions, though, which may be what you mean.
I stopped reading at "OK, I'm going to call it." As if the writer is so prescient that after several techcrunch columns saying digg is dead, wow, he had an epiphany - digg is dead! I have to tell everyone, so they'll be impressed by my keen insight!

Of course this was the whole point of digg in the first place, to "democratize the media" because the media seems to be a bunch of braying donkeys who follow the lead ass wherever he wants to go. So in a sense this story really is saying digg is dead. If you actually read it and feel that's its useful, that is.
yeah, that's exactly why we spent a year and a half drafting legislation, traveling to DC, promoting it on websites, blogging, etc. it's all a vast geek conspiracy to get Votizen a couple thousand users.

excellent use of time, don't you think?
I find a lot of good insight in this article (despite the classically linkbait title).

Absolutely, execution is difficult; there a ton of difficult problems to solve on a site like this, e.g.: How can the system allow noobs to participate and advance without incentivizing sock-puppets? Are voting circles good (increasing participation) or bad (decreasing honest assessment/diversity of content)?

No site is going to get it all right, but I think it's both appropriate and useful to periodically assess: what are some of the Digg solutions that didn't turn out to work as well as alternate solutions?

On a few points, the article doesn't persuade me, including the claim that a twitter-like mostly-personalized homepage beats a community-wide homepage: maybe yes, maybe no. But several other strategies adopted by Digg do seem to be problematic over the long-term, and kudos to the author for highlighting a bunch of relevant ones. Bigger kudos to reddit for pretty consistently adopting smart solutions to these same problems.
Bacause an ad for something I'm genuinely interested in isn't an ad -- it's a useful link.
Great reply. However, I think something is only worth doing if it's impossible.

Your argument is like Chomsky's argument about the poverty of the stimulus, just in reverse. There are heuristics that let us radically prune the N^2 possible relationships between things into a much smaller set that will let us do things that would be otherwise unscalable.
For simple text classification, you should just use something like Wekka, rainbow or the Google Prediction API. The hardest part is always labeling and verifying your category training data. There are many open source algorithms that can do the classification and any form of naive bayes will probably be good enough.
I've reread it a few times, plus your original post, and I still don't get it.

YCombinator's application is not hoop-jumping. It's training. These are questions that you should be asking yourself about your idea anyway, regardless of whether you seek YC funding. Big-time VC funds will ask you the same questions, except that they require a personal introduction to even get to that point. Heck, customers will ask you the same thing, except that they want you to show them the answers through your product instead of tell them through an application form.

Also, the value of YCombinator is not in the $20K. It's in the introductions they give you, and how hard they work to put you in front of big-money investors. We saw that a couple days ago with the e-mail exchange where PG tried to get Union Square Ventures to invest in AirBnB. Most investors won't even look at you without a personal introduction from someone they trust.
Proper in this case: OmniAuth abstracts away the actual OAuth process and, as is always proper, you should be testing your application code not your libraries.
Yup, but it's not an easy issue as research, e.g., those in P2P, have shown. A bit like the arms-race in anti-virus.
Some examples of manipulation include Jon Skeet on StackOverflow (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784257).
Letting users tune their trust has an advantage (hopefully) because given enough configurability and a good UI, every user will different trust configuration making the old adage true to a great extent; for an attacker, "she can fool all people some of the time, some people all the time but not all people all of the time".
On December 21, 1988, the Libyan government murdered 189 Americans and almost a hundred other nationals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103

What is shameful is that it took this long to remove that parasite.
I didn't know about these Facebook test accounts. Thanks for letting me know. These will be very helpful.
I learned way more from my Mac than school ever gave me.

Me too!
One-page printer version: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9214796/Elgan_W...
Thankfully there's a happy fusion of spinning rust and SSD: flashcache [0] and L2ARC/ZIL [1]. Cheaper win.

[0]: https://github.com/facebook/flashcache
[1]: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test
Long, but well reasoned article on EBS. Basically comes down to-know your load, and be darned sure you have adequate metrics in place for tracking latency.
shoot an email to metaprinter at g m a i l d 0 t c 0 m.
How to Make Solar Panels
According to that chart 100 millisieverts/year (or 0.01 per hour) is linked to increased cancer risk. The readings in cities near the reactor look like between 0.1 and 0.8. Not good if it doesn't go down.
Rewordio.us Stats - YTD
We got some good traffic (and growing!) after John posted a new feature here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2341175

Wanted to share some stats pre-HN effect. I'll do another update soon.
Then it should be shown in the context of being an interesting link. I would ask also, when was the last time an ad was interesting to you? Was something in a popup, interstitial, popover, popunder, popdown, sidebar link, video preroll or post roll or inserted promo actually interesting? Was it something that you purposely clicked to find out more?
Digg != Wisdom of Crowds
This. Headphones sometimes help, but there are times when I think I'd be better off with a VT100 and a door. I wish anyone beyond Microsoft and Fog Creek realized what a huge waste it is to let random people knock me out of the zone incessantly.
Can you provide more detail on the comma rule.

I do text extraction for lynk.ly. First we clean the HTML for the page. Then remove a bunch of tags we consider not useful like script or embed.

Then we looked at all the opening tags and checked if they have specific text in them like "hide", "display:none". If it does, then we skip it the tag.

Finally we get text from a tag if its above a specific threshold.

This seems to have worked best for us.

To see it in action, check it out at lynk.ly
Reminds me of Mrs. Doubtfire. "I am job?"
Maybe it's a bit trite, to say this, but to me, this is the glory of science. I don't believe we truly _fundamentally_ understand the universe, maybe it's not even possible to actually understand it fully, but the scientific method gives an incredibly useful framework for us to model and reason about the universe and to actually get useful results with that framework - and it works along a whole spectrum of abstraction and different disciplines.
This caused a bunch of headaches at Vimeo while working on our iframe embed code a couple months back. If I remember correctly Safari (and now I believe Chrome 10) will not send cookies in iframe POSTs unless a user specifically navigates in that iframe. So for example clicking the "like" button in a Vimeo video wouldn't work right away. There is a workaround: you programmatically fake a POST right away, and the second POST works because the user has interacted with it.

This might be a nice "headache" for marketers, but there are legit uses. As a developer I'd prefer if browsers were consistent in their default handling of cookies.
This is a great idea but it would be much more useful if the pins were color-coded to indicate danger levels.
Congratulations, XKCD, you have managed to make me get off Hacker News.

For the moment.
This is very similar to the arguments in the game dev community defining whether one has ascended from hobbyist to indie status. It's nothing more than an infantile attempt to stroke the egos of the people who consider themselves in the upper-most status.

If somebody misnaming their "waste of server space", "project" or "startup" according to your personal definition offends you then well, that's your problem, not mine. Suck it up and learn to deal with it.
It seems like a common situation in the tech world for those with a little capability to deal with some legacy system that you somehow get lumped with or become the "expert". Maybe it's inevitable, people do get bored with doing the same things all the time.

I'd love to hear some of the music that came out of your experience - anywhere to listen to it?
Code for society
I'm looking to volunteer most of my time and would love suggestions for projects to start or join.

I studied physics at Caltech, but I am much better at coding than I am at physics. I've been using python for years and have completed several ~10k line projects.

Ideally the project would involve machine learning, would clearly benefit society and would be unlikely to ever happen commercially.
4x AA is standard to 360 games.
I meant yes, my feelings have changed about RFS3. I would no longer be so enthusiastic about funding companies built on Twitter.
Labour mobility is a relatively new concept too. In the days before nuclear families, people have large extended families to rely on for childcare, and are in a better position to look after their elderly without having to send them to a nursing home. I'm not saying labour mobility is a bad thing, but they have their own policy issues.
Is it better to be known as a quitter or loser?

Is that the question???
Coalition launches Libya attacks
That's a very valid point. You can get reallllly far with just one really powerful database.

But, if you've built a site on the precondition that one database is enough, with a lot of joins so you can't split tables, and your hardware can't keep up.. you're in a really bad place. I say this out of experience ;)
I have an idea for a barcode and RFID scanner as well as a weight scale pad that can be retrofired into refrigerators and pantries. The concept is that ever time you remove and add a food item to the refrigerator or pantry it would take a weight measurement and gauge your consumption therefor it would be able to predict and assemble a shopping list of items that need to be purchased in the upcoming day or week.

Further it would be tied into a recipe data store so a user could find recipes that they have the necessary items for.

There is another angle in which if it caught on the list could be provided to the local grocery store for fulfillment so the list of items would be prepared and boxed at the store and the user would then be able to pick it up, further if it became big enough it may support delivery services.

As well there are personal chef services in which a chef prepares meals for a few clientele, In this situation, the Chef could be provided a list of inventory on site that wold allow them to formulate meal plans based on inventory at the home.

Finally one way I though of monetizing it was to allow coupon marketing in which when an item was up for restocking an alternative vendor could target the customer with a discount for choosing their product over a competitors. Say a person generally purchases Kraft Mayonnaise, the coupon service would allow Hellmans to provide a coupon to the client in an effort to try to sway their buying decision over to their product or allow Kraft to provide one as a loyalty incentive.

My though was building a system that could be retrofitted into existing refrigerators and pantries would allow users to adopt the system without the need for large capital outlay, then patent the system and offer good royalty agreements to manufacturers of refrigerators, etc. to gain adoption in the next gen of kitchen appliances.

Realistically though, I will never peruse this idea, the capital outlay to just get the prototype hardware is beyond my means and all of the Angle Investors I know, do not invest in hardware based ventures they are strictly software guys so it would most likely require me to bankroll it. That coupled with my consultancy has pretty much just left it to languish in my mind as just a cool idea that I ponder now and then. I would live to build it, but I just don't have the resources needed to get it to the point where I could pursue investment. It's one of those ideas that requires significant investment just to get it to the point of getting real investment dollars.
http://www.princeton.edu/3D3A/

that is his lab's page with a bit more general information about what he is doing.

this describes the process a bit more clearly http://www.princeton.edu/3D3A/BACCH_intro.html
it is a way of delivering binaural audio over loud speakers.

I haven't read through his papers very closely yet, but in what I have read he seems to misrepresent what ambisonics was on about so I'm dubious. But definitely interesting stuff and worth further research.
When you do something which takes time for a given audience, that is called "jumping through hoops." It is a figure of speech.

Yes, VC's ask a lot of questions. Even harder ones. They even want very long business plans. And more. The difference is VC's are going to give you MILLIONS of dollars if you jump through all their hoops. Not just a little more than what would pay your relocation and rent while you move to California. I trust you can see the difference.

Also, are you sure you read/reread my post? I clearly said in there "Yes the intros are a good perk, but if you truly have something, you will get there regardless." So I'm wondering why you bring up the intros as a perk beyond the money as I already pointed that out in my post.
Don't forget Long Cheng (Laos):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL_c5tYdw-c
Very interesting. Do you have a demo?
"All it needed to do was get rid of the universal front page in favor of Twitter- and Facebook-like individual front pages, where everyone has a different front page based on who he or she is following."

If I recall correctly, this was one of several features they introduced in late 2010 that caused a mass exodus of users. Suddenly, my front page was mostly empty and unchanging since I had largely ignored Digg's friend system. You could optionally load the "universal front page" but the community seemed to have died overnight -- the top stories went from having 400 comments to 10 comments, most of which were "Where did everybody go?"