skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
my favorite number is 4 but I entered 7 because I wanted something higher and this was the highest prime number within that range :)
Warner Bros. releases five more movies for rent on Facebook
Part of the philosophy he's professed in the past is that exposure to bad arguments is good, not because there's no right and wrong, but because recognising bad arguments and why they are bad is good for you.
Headliner.FM and Mike More [Interview]
I see it differently. A good startup has multiple options about what great products it can try to build, the cost and revenue models behind them, and its funding strategy. Products that are great for people who are throwing around money in a frothy bubble environment can be millsontes in a buttoned-down, post-crash situation. So while too much reading thinking about the overall context is a distraction, ignoring it hugely increases risk and misses opportunities for significant advantages.
Anyone want to throw in ideas on why Color is such a hot topic?

Seems to me a mixture of envy and schadenfreude.
I come off with the feeling it is actually composed by an Iranian (possibly a team but could be an individual) who is clearly motivated to make "politically correct" (from the POV of the Iranian govt.) speeches. He goes to great lengths to praise his government, ambassador and president while denouncing all dissidents, separatists, Israel and the US. I cannot help feeling he/they have some connection with the government. Possibly the whole teenage cyberpunk rhetoric was deliberate (see repeated "hard for you easy for me" and "I was so fast" and the absurd "I will factor large integers") and little more than a poorly executed smoke screen to divert attention.
I sense that some of your suffering may be caused by a negative attachment to an inherently transient distro.
"It's not a surprise that we know we have crises every five or ten years. My daughter came home from school one day and said, 'daddy, what's a financial crisis?' And without trying to be funny, I said, 'it's the type of thing that happens every five, ten, seven, years.' And she said: 'why is everybody so surprised?' So we shouldn't be surprised..." - Jamie Dimon (Chairman & CEO @ JP Morgan; Dir of the NY Federal Reserve)

If you agree with Mr. Dimon, the party will come to an end sooner or later - bubble or no bubble. Your best bet is to relax, enjoy yourself, have some drinks and ensure you have a driver to take you home when the party is over. As John Wooden said, "Failure to prepare is preparing to fail."

Personally, I don't know if there is a bubble. But, I see plenty of cracks in the system that are cause for concern.
That's an infuriating title and even more infuriating article. Apple and the Mac had pretty much nothing to do with the invention of the wiki. Inspiration does not equal "was born of".

Celebrate the wiki, and its creator, by giving credit where credit is due: Ward Cunningham invented the wiki. He stood on the shoulders of giants, as do most people who do great things, but don't make him a single sentence in an article purportedly about his creation. That's just rude.

If you want to write an article about Hypercard, write a bloody article about Hypercard, don't try to ride on the coattails of the wiki.
Scott Adams is basically a troll in his writing. You have to like that. (I don’t.)

(Not that there is anything wrong with his writing. You probably just shouldn’t take him serious or try to respond to his arguments.)

(His comics are really funny and I’m not aware of anything he could write to change that.)
I'd be interested to see how these convex structures relate to neural patterns... I'm sure these shapes some how mathematically can be traced back to the structure of the neural connection patterns that are fired when we hear these scales.

This idea of scales being the basic patterns that music is based on also reminds of color schemes - scales seem to be to hearing as color schemes are to vision.

Ha put that together and... web app idea! A scale generator for musicians just like the color scheme generators that we have for web designers. :P
:) +1
My current project has 30 directories with 73 partial Sass files, which compile down to one 320kb file.

Isn't that a lot to download? That's like 2 seconds on average to download that file in the U.S., and probably in the 10 seconds or higher range for a lot of folks. I guess if the download is delayed to after some kind of engagement (sign up, etc) it's not a big deal?

Is 320K of CSS really necessary? (legitimately asking)
In thinking back, that's exactly why I picked 4.

I just clicked whatever was closest because I wasn't even thinking about the exercise.
> As for protection suit: contamination, why should it matter if it is only as bad as eating a banana? Your banana argument really makes no sense.

How radiation affects one's body is a complex issue. The inverse square law also comes into effect. So something can be dangerous close up, but no threat to anyone who doesn't get close.

Ars Technica has a nice article about radiation that goes into these issues in more detail than I can:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/03/know-your-nukes-...

My main point about bananas, though, is that radiation is normal. You experience it every single day, even if you don't realize it. All sorts of background radiation is constantly going through your body. Not to mention intentional exposures like chest X-rays.

It's sort of like fire, then. You can burn yourself and you should treat it carefully. You should fear it enough to avoid burning yourself, but not much more than that. It's also going to become just about as necessary to civilization as fire, soon, from the look of things.

Maybe fusion will pan out and I hope so, but people are then going to have to learn all about neutrons and why they can make normal materials become radioactive.... But maybe clever moderator designs will make it so that most neutrons are absorbed by easily replaceable things that don't become anything nasty.
Is it wise to publish updated results while the data is still being gathered? Random selection should be blind and independent and its quite possible people may change their vote to favor an 'unpopular' number or vice versa.
You didn't count my 11 :(
How do you be "better at picking random numbers"?
It ended up getting posted to Reddit, and has been making the rounds elsewhere. (Over 100,000 uniques, holy cow!)

Unfortunately, the referrer wasn't tracked. I wasn't expecting to get enough hits for it to matter. The expectation was for maybe 100 over a week. IP addresses are tracked, so I'll eventually do a location breakdown.
"absurdly cynical" is his stock in trade. Have you never read Dilbert?

It seems to me the response said exactly what he wanted and needed it to. What more does he have to apologize for, exactly? Committing a thoughtcrime?
The Homeless at College
Video: How Startups Can Take Advantage of The Bubble
PS: Something like this, with more mathematics applied. http://www.scalerator.com/
user:	weixiyen
created:	1147 days ago

If this is astroturf, then http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=weixiyen is really impressive ground work.
LinkedIn and the social graph in general will really help employers avoid these scams. Every reference I've done is with someone who I have significant connection with between the different graphs of LinkedIn, Twitter, and others.

Of course, this is the NYC tech community so doesn't apply to 99% of hires that happen... yet.
Victorian Plumbing Expands Its Range Of Kitchen Taps
The best thing Color could do would be to take a couple of percent from that $41mil and buy one of the really good Camera apps on iOS and Android.

Color is a compelling idea, but any interest I have in playing with it as early adopter is completely killed by the atrocious UI and limited camera functionality I would be subject to.
And in some cases even pets have been granted diplomas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colby_Nolan
Timelapse aurora from Norway
The number picker was random, some people got a drop down, some got a list of numbers, some got a slider etc etc etc
Instead of creating a lean startup, build it to flip.
TGP Swingermoney Com - Movies Galleries - Alex Pix
> The "you're too emotional" to really understand.

I understand that people are claiming this is his argument, but I don't see it. He makes the argument that "men's rights" (and implicitly "women's rights") discussions are emotional, and he's right. So are discussions about race, healthcare, Android vs iPhone, etc. He certainly doesn't say anything about any group being "too emotional."

> That's absurdly cynical and basically argues that, at least where humans are concerned, there is no right or wrong

Again, I don't see this interpretation. As I read it, he says that he believes people can't be convinced by evidence to change a position... and it turns out he's right: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/...
Yes, the posturing did not lend credibility to his statements. Besides that, it seems vaguely plausible.
I'm cautiously optimistic that this piece is satire, although you can never be sure.
Why sessions are bad
Ideally, I use Sass with Compass (http://compass-style.org/). This alone is a great start to keeping things organized. One of the things I love about Sass is that it allows partials and variable declarations, which both help immensely with code organization.

Then, my code is usually organized as follows. Each section can be extracted to a partial if it gets long enough or if more separation is desired.

Framework includes and resets
Variable declarations — colors, possibly specific widths
Universal method declarations
Standard global tags — headings, p, a, ul, li, etc...
Generic form styling, usually in a dedicated partial
Layout — container, header, content, footer
Then to specific section styling

Since Sass uses indentation, I indent everything in each section within a top level tag. This really helps visually distinguish each section and gives a much less uniform look to the stylesheet which makes it a lot more scannable. If a section uses methods exclusively I'll declare them just above the top-level section tag.

I'm pretty happy with this approach. It was formed fairly organically but become more defined as I use it for more projects. It also seems to work well for both large and small projects, since partials can be used when the code starts getting long.
Stickam - The Live Community, Live Streaming, Video Chat
Even distribution, instead of bell-curves around popular/bias numbers.
"Elite brain (elite programmer): (way)<1M / year"

"Elite brain" isn't some clean up hitter lighting up code or architecting for you. Elite brain is CTO, or EVP of technology. In terms of e.g., basketball, the Micky Arison of Apple is undoubtedly Steve Jobs, so LeBron is someone like Jony Ives. I'm quite sure Jony is walking away with way more than $20M after designing the iPod, iPhone and iPad (some speculate it's somewhere in the $150-200 Million range).
HyperCard was the last gasp of Woz's Apple, the respectable one that made tools for human beings. Jobs' Apple prefers selling appliances to consumers, which spelled doom for things that empower them.
I currently use Gearman in my app (and supervisord), but I also looked into RabbitMQ. It was this comment on SO that made me go with Gearman.

I would say that Gearman is better for queuing "jobs" and RabbitMQ is better for queuing "data". Of course, they are both really the same thing, but the way it works out for me is that if you are trying to "fan out" work to be done, and the workers can work independently, Gearman is the better way to do it. But if you are trying to feed data from a lot of sources down into fewer data consumers, RabbitMQ is the better solution.

Source http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2283955/rabbitmq-or-gearm...

I tried both technologies in my app, and Gearman was eventually easier to work with. YMMV.
Note however that different types of input systems were used. Refreshes show the following different types:

* A slider that need to be dragged to choose a value.
* A list of numbers shown with highlighting on hover.
* An input cursor that on hover changes to a list of numbers (within a curved border this time).
* A text field (enclosed in a circular border), allowing manual input.

I'm quite interested in how results varied depending upon input type (possibly more interesting than seeing how they vary by referrer).
Project Hydra: the USB Multiheaded Monster (2004)
Seems like people are so number centric and go for the universal lucky number. Not sure why.
How did this help? Were you able to do any behavior analysis based on this small experiment?

I would suggest, go on a weekly result and keep tabs on result variation.

Try posting it on various/diverse communities. This might help to understand alot about visitor behavior on various websites as you can track referring websites too.

If possible graph the picks depending upon the referring websites. Or even a graph based on region, tracking via IP should be easy.

For those who missed the Parent post, check here
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2375149
I think he meant a Thinkpad running Windows.
Darpa gets behind bid for fire fighting electric wands
The site asks you to pick a random number, not mentioning anything about trying to achieve a specific distribution.

EDIT: Downvotes and no comments, nice. You guys seem to be misunderstanding something. If asked to picked any number ("random") between 1 and 10, to suggest that the outcome is "wrong" because the distribution isn't uniform doesn't make any sense at all. It would be a completely different experiment if we were asked to pick a number between 1 and 10 such that the outcome after x number of independent trials has a uniform (or gaussian/exponential/etc) distribution. This seems to be what some people are assuming.
Well, why don't you have a look? :) http://nfrom1to10.appspot.com/results/
320K is a lot, no question. This project hasn't been released to public yet, and there are areas to optimize.

Keep in mind that this only 42k gzipped.
I solved this problem by using software. Using your current brain state is a terrible seed for randomness.
The OP does realize that "Windows" is recognized as a valid trademark, yes?
The competition has to be good enough to outweigh the economy of scale.
I just updated the results page with a breakdown per-interface. There are more metrics involved, but it'll be a little while before those get pulled together. (The volume of data was unexpected, to say the least, so there weren't any stats helpers in place prior to "launch".)

As for "revealing" the answers ahead of time, the whole question of "Pick a number from 1 to 10" and the common result being 7 is well known (ish), so I'm not too worried. Plus, the results aren't visible until you choose. PLUS, there were over 80k votes before that first graph was available, and over 140k by the time I put the per-interface breakdown up.

Hopefully, the volume will outweigh the people who try to manipulate it. (There's also IP tracking, which will eventually be used to help filter out anomalies, in addition to geolocating.)

I know, it's not exactly precise science, but it's a fun experiment that was simple and kept the friction to a minimum. I'm not exactly trying to write a paper. :)

Thanks to everyone who voted and spread the word, especially jedberg who posted it to Reddit.
Broadness in itself is not a reason to deny a trademark. "Christmas Tree Shops" is hardly distinctive. "McDonalds" is a last name. These trademarks are recognized because brands were successfully and identifiably built around them. I think the same can be said about the app store - ask any "normal" who he thinks of when he hears the phrase "App Store." Hint: it's not Google or Amazon.
You have refuted almost none of the points he made.

He's not talking about Mac/iOS app development so Xcode is irrelevant.

He's not talking about making static content sites - so Coda isn't relevant.

These laptops are made out of unibody aluminum and the keyboard glows in the dark

Now I'm wondering if you're just being sarcastic.

I know there are lots of people who use Mac OS X for web development so I'm interested in hearing what they have to say about how they manage.
IMHO, it's not.

I'm working on a few relatively complex web apps where the CSS download time don't come to anywhere near that size. In my world (mobile devices, in particular) 320k would be totally unacceptable. 100k is about the point where I start re-evaluating my design.
Looking forward to the HN pseudo-feminists coming out of the woodwork on this one.

Queue the white knights in 3, 2, 1, Go.
Heh, I can respect where you're coming from.

I'm not a buddhist scholar, but of the things that's always interested me about buddhisms path through the world is how adaptive the underlying concepts can be to new cultural contexts. I think, in a lot of ways, that the western cultural context is just a new adaptation on that trend. You have people who sincerely try to get at the heart of the religion/philosophy and you have people that co-opt the names for their own uses, commercial or otherwise.

I'd wager that if we looked at the history of buddhism as it entered japan, there would be similar trends of it being used politically and secularly (but don't quote me on that if I turn out to be horribly wrong).

I think I get more bothered when I see things like mini cubicle zen-gardens, or anyone else profiteering off of a barely there gloss of the cultural history.

As for open-source software, and people trying to instill their distro with an ambiance of 'zen', I think it's a little silly, but I don't think it was done maliciously, and ultimately I don't think it will do a whole lot to really water down the deep and expansive annals of buddhist history.

I think it's good to be sensitive to this sort of thing, and to be aware of who you might be offending. Maybe I'm not being as considerate of the issue as I should be. I suppose I just think that realistically, buddhist culture as it stands in the world is going to go on, largely unaffected by the west and our views, but perhaps greatly impacted by inexorable march of modernity.

I personally like buddhism because if they're right, I get a bunch more chances to figure it out. Kidding, of course... kind of.
The biggest problem that I have with Sass is that the file/line references in your developer tools point at the compiled CSS files, and so you don't have any real reference to where in your Sass files that style is defined. Any solution for this?
That bit of "flair" was added almost on a whim. I'm glad I did add it. I think that helped the experiment get the attention it did, especially when it got onto Reddit. It's funny how a simple factor can (probably) have such a big impact.

Also, the unintentional "mystery" of not including any information about the who or why on the site itself may have helped. I noticed many comments on HN and Reddit that speculated about each, which no doubt increased the activity profile. A little bit of personality goes a long way.
Minifying Javascript with Jake and UglifyJS
Microsoft ecosystem valued at $580 billion per year
You can get around that by using an array, and having functions to get and set parts of the array.

That stops the object overhead in python from killing memory.

But it's not the prettiest way to do things.
um, your second statement has nothing to do with the first statement. The whole point of a good package management system is so that you don't have to do a

tar xvzf foo.tar.gz;cd foo;./configure && make;

for every piece of software you want.
The Tomb Raider Trilogy Pack Released
Is it just me or does that top bar look EXACTLY like Apple.com's top bar??
Setting up a local dev instance evolved into a pathological week long chore at any of the startups I've worked at in the past five years. Sadly, he's right and it is impossible to package up what you need in a sensible manner across multiple platforms. However, most of the toughest bugs I experienced involve the interaction between the load balancer/caching layer and the app layer, or how the system performed when the database was huge. These are impossible to solve with a local instance, anyway. Might as well start out with a process like Quora and have developer instances which you can spin up in the cloud. Having a local setup at all is a waste of time in a world with cheap cloud services.
I think alot of it depends what it is that you are building. My approach to would be different if it were building a large scale web app vs a website and it also depends on the team thats helping to maintain it (ie. if it were to be maintained by engineers who don't really know or care for css or a team of web devs)

I always start off with a base which consists of the misc. browser fixes and hacks + basic typography elements, rough blocking. My philosophy on formatting really follows what everyone here is saying. I really prefer horizontal lines and proper tabbing of all the sub elements because its really hard to read otherwise.

While commenting is really good and I like it, finding the proper balance is the key. When you're doing fast iteration it gets really tedious and cumbersome to go back and make sure your comments are in sync.

This is how i arrange my css:
http://maderogue.com/public/assets/css/base.css

For bigger project I like to break things down by specific functions & models.
(ie. tables, buttons, sorting controls, etc.)

i really like the way jquery ui themes are done.
mobile.dev.company@gmail.com
It's not in a very obvious place. Downloading the mysql source is one of the most annoying experiences I've had on an OSS site. Iframes, select boxes, login forms! Just give me a list!
The exception proves the rule? Note, by the way, that I said Minneapolis. I admit that the entirety of the Midwest houses some great schools and centers of social development, but I don't think that's representative of the norm.

I would genuinely like to know if my impression of Minneapolis is incorrect. In what way is its technology adoption on par with that of San Francisco or New York? Is it at the leading edge of anything?
TOFU would be a lot nicer if certificates were hierarchical, ie. I could say that trust this CA for all *.citibank.com certs. Wildcard certs mitigate the need for that a little, but they are bit more insecure (imho. with wildcard cert attacker needs to gain access to any of your servers to impersonate any other server. With individual certs, attacker needs to either gain access to your CA or is only able to impersonate the compromised server).

Of course transition period would be bit painful if everybody would begin signing their own certs. Tracking individual certs allows much nicer transition, as the certs can continue to be signed by global CAs, but then citibank-like solutions would be problematic.
Couldn't agree more. I've developed for the Blackberry platform for several years now, and they've gotten slightly better the past few months but compared to Android or iOS, we're treated like dogshit.
I must agree... Heres an sisue. 99% of the time there are no CAs for a https of a regular site that usually uses http. HOWEVER there is no problem with the certificate.

What does that mean? It means that when looking at the fun little multi step accepting certificates bells and whistles that FF throws I have absolutely no way of knowing if there is a 3rd party. There is nothing helping me out. And I am a "power user". Put those messages to a regular user and you get 3x as dumbfounded. So if 99% of the people don't understand WTF is going on, how can we help prevent any fraud?
Come2Play