skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a shame.

I can't imagine there's a significant financial burden imposed by Data.gov (can't speak to the other services). I mean, the data collection certainly is the most expensive component... and from what I understand that keeps going independent of Data.gov. Presumably, the data is collected for programs beyond Data.gov - only more reason to keep maintaining the site since the marginal cost is minimal.

Data.gov has been a useful resource for both my own work (marketing & sociological research), but more importantly is a great way to find free, relevant data for cutting one's data analysis chops - either as student or professional.

As a stats nerd, I find this very depressing.

[edit: As an amusing aside regarding my "relevant" data comment. A few years ago I was trying to develop a viz technique that I knew some potential clients would like, but I lacked a good data set that fit the requirements. I eventually ended up using R and other various free tools to create visualizations of fish weight and length depending on various conditions such as geography, water temp and a few others I forget. I certainly learned a lot, but I certainly would have benefited by having a data set that was both relevant in the real world and met the contraints of my problem.]
Poll: How many of you read The Daily WTF?
Just wanted to know how many of HNers read Alex's The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com)
Yes, I read all posts.
Yes, I read once in a while
No, I haven't heard
I Don't remember visiting this site
The headline BI chose is slightly misleading because the very top of the article says that, "Fox News has the top 12 most-watched shows so far this year," and goes on to say that, "this marks the network's ninth straight year as the number one channel in cable."

That said, it does mention that Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have lost significant fractions of their audience (30% and 19%, respectively).
What offends me is the godaddy baseball caps. As a customer I feel like I'm going on Bob's trip with him in full support of what he's doing.
Sadly, AirBnB has failed for me more than 90% of the time. In NYC there were overtly shady people, such as a dude who had at least 3 accounts, 2 of which he would pose as women. However, the biggest problems are flakes and people who list their apartment as being available when it really isn't. To AirBnB's credit, housing in NYC is shady to begin with, and the one time it worked, it was great.
WebOS/Bada/Android(Linux), WindowsPhone(CE) and iOS(Mach) are all very different. Each platform uses its own string class, threading logic and UI layer. The lack of standardization is almost bizarre when you factor in HTML5. This results in lots of developers sitting on the fence.

Five platforms, five compilers, five api´s... yet everything runs on 32bit ARM, uses ANSI/ISO C-like syntax and reads UTF8 over HTTP.

I tried writing something that was multiplatform with HybridKit and it was almost impossible. Even stupid code generation might be too much. So solid design and custom code seems like a safe bet.
Ask HN: Any advice for our first meeting with an angel investor?
Hello everyone!

We have our first meeting with an angel investor tomorrow, so I figured I would see what advice the HN community would offer on talking/negotiating/working with angels.

We are from the Midwest, so the tech startup environment is quite different. I'd be especially interested in hearing from any other Midwest tech startups that got angel funding.

Thanks in advance!
Many thanks!
I've just found a simple tutorial of how to use it in Python script: http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/api-tutorial1.h...

So, I've written my own script, which minified seven js-files with total size 84.8 KB to one file with size 26.7 KB. Plus gzip and it will be very small.

Thanks again.
Right, but given Clarkson's well-known antipathy towards anything green, Tesla probably could argue in court that the libel (if there was any) was intentional. It might not be true, but it would be easier to show for Clarkson than for arbitrary journalist X.
No, it's not always pleasant. I admit that. But you know what's less pleasant? Twitter shutting down because they can't pay the server bills. The relevant economic concept here is opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of Twitter not showing ads is charging for their service. The next greatest opportunity cost is them not existing. So many people think the internet operates independently of the principles of economics. Well, it doesn't.

And I also don't feel the analogy is apt. To use the well-worn metaphor of Twitter as cocktail party, it's like having a conversation with your friend about, say, Arduino's, and having the host, whom you don't know, walk by and say "Oh yeah website X is having a great sale on those", and then they're off again to serve Jell-O shots. I chose to go to Twitter's party, so at least I'll nod politely to the host because they're the ones providing the free booze.
No, they can't make it better if Google prevents them from indexing significant parts of the web.

The point has been made, several times by more than one person, and yet you ignore it.
Angry Nerds
That's what a patent is for: get you twenty year lead to market.

Even if it is just beeswax, this is a novel application.
Maybe this is a quibble but "Eating your own dogfood" refers to using your own products. I think Twitter probably does that.

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

It seems you meaning not admitting mistakes/showing weakness. I agree companies should admit mistakes in the present era.
Interesting Interview Question
This joke is a little too believable considering that Google has banned itself multiple time before. Danny Sullivan tweeted on this:

"google bans itself. april fools! wait, was real http://selnd.com/hVXAkZ & real http://selnd.com/cM5LBq & real http://selnd.com/ebJiNB :)"
So if the elephant were dead by the hand of a poor African, it would be okay in your eyes? Income seems like an arbitrary factor to determine whether or not it is morally acceptable to kill an animal.
I cringed seeing the neighboring villagers trampling the same field that the elephants had been trampling. Talk about unintended consequences.
Just hit the flag button and it'll be taken care of.
Well its hard to get better when you have a monopolist using their monopoly weight to keep customers from using your product or other content that you have a monopoly on.

I find it odd that you're not saying that Google should let there be an open playing field. If a site wants to host both Google and Bing they should be able to.

Of course when it comes to Google they can do no evil -- because they told you so.
And it's lunch time down here in NZ at the start of the world :)
What studies have been done on the effect of commuting on happiness?
The idea is that you can still code with high-level PHP, but then get the performance of C++

I love this quote, because C++ was built with the exact same abstraction in mind.
Why is this Airbnb's fault? I just finished traveling Europe while using Airbnb and never had a problem. Why? I message at least 5-10 people, and I talked all first through the message function, making sure they're not insane (the fact they're charging you extra was a good warning sign there). If the person acted shady/mean/impatient/etc, I simply removed that place from my choices.

The one time I had an issue (one cancelled on me less than a week before arriving), Airbnb gave me a $50 certificate as apology and helped me rebook a new place pronto.

Yeah, there are weird people on there, but it's easy to weed them out.

I would definitely report the person to Airbnb, since they're charging extra (which is against the rules).
In general, I found working for myself was more stressful. If you work for The Man, then when you screw up, it's generally The Man's problem. If you work for yourself and screw up, there's nobody to blame but yourself, and you're completely responsible for fixing it.
Upvoted for pointing out that any marginal program promoted by Zimbabwean officials citing "benefits to the local economy" is utter bullshit.

If any of those officials actually cared about the local economy (or actually intended to let the money reach it), they wouldn't have demolished those economies with their utterly unrestrained corruption and graft.

Honestly, believing propaganda like that makes you look as naive as the people who believe that the wives of abusive husbands "just happen to keep falling down the stairs."
I haven't read it in a long time and don't plan on visiting it again any time soon.
Top 7 Apps Built on Top of Google App Engine
Something similar happened to chouchsurfing.
At the beginning it was a small community with a high level of trust and people knew what it was about, and behaved accordingly.
Then it grew too much and you find all kind of users, many who just think that's a way to sleep for free and who avoid interaction with their hosts.
I guess airbnb will have to adapt (I'm pretty sure they are aware of the problem) and find ways to filter out the bad guys. There's gonna be many more of them as soon as they find out the opportunity.
Currently employed at a large company, easily defined as "The Man", although I'm leaving soon to join a startup.

Looking at the results of the poll, I can't believe how many people here own their own businesses. That's great!
Be clear on what you want. If you want funding, specifically ask for it.
Crystallization of the Object Oriented Style
Comparison of ideas and goals behind smalltalk and ruby
I've used AirBnB a couple times in DC and it worked out really well. Go with the people who have been heavily reviewed/starred the first time you use the service and you shouldn't go wrong. Also maybe try going with places where you're getting the entire apartment and not just a room or couch. A bit more expensive, but again for your first time it may give you a little more peace of mind.
Not Being Steve’s Bitch
My favorite theme is the "Oblivion" one for gedit, but I don't use gedit, so I remade it for TextMate and Xcode 3/4.

http://natestedman.com/post/morrowind-for-textmate-xcode/

I am sitting on a mostly-done vim version right now as well, the GUI colors are all good, but I wiped out the terminal colors (I want them to just be the defaults). I'm not exactly a vim expert and I almost always use the terminal vim exclusively for git commits, which don't really need highlighting, so the motivation to fix those sort of disappeared.
Not arbitrary at all. As soon as large sums of money are involved, the question goes from one of pure necessity to one that tries to "balance" a lack of necessity against the promise of an easy buck.

Moral Hazard 101.
I'm not saying it's AirBnB's fault, but it's definitely an issue they'll need to constantly address as they grow.

I did report them but the you bring up a good point about charging extra deposit fees. As a new user, I have no idea that such practices are against the rules ... so it didn't really raise a flag for me.
The "sunshine list": Ontario Public Sector Salaries Over $100K
You can reply without being offensive. You could also save time by not prefacing some of your sentences with insults.

Come on, uncool.

Additionally, the article you linked says (among other pros and cons)

Some countries, including South Africa, Zimbabwe,
Botswana, and Namibia, had been able to manage their
elephant populations and claimed that increased
populations were causing increased agricultural losses,
decreased revenue from hunting and increased conflicts
between elephants and local residents.

Which is something you ignore in your arguments. Did you happen to miss that part in the page you linked?

The money these countries get from allowing safaris does pay for the parks they preserve. The few animals killed (legally) do not have a significant impact on the population as a whole, and I'd argue have a significant positive impact on the parks as a whole.

Thanks for the perspective, though.
It's still a good essay -- I wrote about it at the time.

http://chester.id.au/2009/12/29/musos-and-masters/
Already did. Just wanted people to know there's no reason to click the article to begin with.
I know what you mean. I find it incredibly frustrating that we HAPPILY go after minuscule savings on things like data.gov and NPR, meanwhile it is 100% taboo to talk about cutting big budget areas like the military. In my opinion we need to be looking at the big 3 because that is where we have the best opportunity to make significant improvements.

Defense

Social Security

Medicare/Medicaid
Entry tier support usually are fairly inexperienced reps. They are expected to stick to the script, because they typically don't know enough to go off-script. It can make an individual call longer, but it makes most calls shorter by standardizing the procedures that fix most cases.

The scripts are designed for solving issues that novice users have. That said, you are putting the rep in a position of possibly getting disciplined if you try to force them off script. At least at some of the places I've worked in the past. (I don't do support now, this was several years ago.)
what we have here is a failure to communicate
99.93% of the source was valid restrict mode. Making v8bench restrict mode clean
Why do some people put C in quotes when talking about the language? Do they also type "Java" or "Perl"? It's bizarre.
That was a very unfortunate experience, but in some ways I'd count it as a win for Airbnb. You were going to stay at this person's house, but because of their messaging interface you were able to screen them and realize that they were, in fact, a crazy person.

I think it is very important to look at the reviews of people you stay with. If someone has more that 7-8 reviews, and everyone has positive things to say then the risk is very low.

I have used Airbnb to stay in some incredibly romantic places (Paris with a view of the Eiffel Tower, Boat in the SF Bay) and by picking people that have 20 or more reviews I have found a very high level of service and... competence.

I feel like I have a lot less control as a host, because almost no-one has reviews (it seems like there must be a lot more guests than hosts), but I think there is a lot less variability with a guest because I am controlling the situation. At worst I have a crazy and irritating person in my house for a few days, where as when I'm staying with someone I am depending on them for shelter.

That said I have hosted 34 people and had no crazys yet (knock on wood). In general people are fun to host.
It is not Airbnb's fault, but he is just pointing out that the growth of the service will bring more shady people and currently there is no easy way to weed out those shady people.
No, it's not always pleasant. I admit that. But you know what's less pleasant? Twitter shutting down because they can't pay the server bills.

Hey, I'm not against them monetizing.

But to monetize, they have to find an ad-format that works. And to find an ad format that works, they can't pretend targeting by itself will do what they need.

Realistically, for example, I think people would prefer a party where host have big "Bud" posters up to a party where the host interrupts individual conversations semi-relevant ads.

Twitter can monetize with plain, ordinary advertising.

The problem is this be admitting that Twitter's segment of the Internet is basically the relatively low-value part of the Internet and that Google's part is the higher-value part. That wouldn't make Twitter impossible, it would just take away from the huge valuation it has. And that could be a problem for a lot of people.
1. I use a hosts file to block sites like hackernews, tech crunch

2. I set objectives the night before for the following day. I identify 3-5 things that I'll accomplish the following day and then I focus on doing those things.

3. I work in pomodoro sprints - 25 minute bursts of focus.

4. I keep a notepad next to my computer so when I'm working in a sprint and I have one of those "oooh, I should check that out!" thoughts, I can write it down, close the loop, and get back to what I'm working on.

5. I take breaks. When I find myself getting distracted, I take a walk around the office / outside.
He didn't say it was the Complete Ultimate Truth, did he?
I'd start with Python. Try to figure out how to do one thing that you think would be cool w/ python. Like learning to play the guitar by learning a song you like.

Really it depends on what you want to do...but Python is widely used in science, finance, math, and the web (thru django). So that covers all of what I'd want. And it's a high-level (read: easy), widely used (read: supported) language.

If I were just starting out I'd use zed shaw's book. As it was I found the django tutorial good; and Norman Matloff's tutorial on scientific python.

I'd learn programming in linux. Install Ubuntu if you don't already use linux. You can dual boot and leave the windows side for video games.

HTH
Similar story here. We're trying to cut down the number of servers at work. I looked into suggesting a company-wide move to Git followed by moving our repositories to Github. Right now, I'm the only one on Git.

Then I realized that I'm using 40 repositories. One of those is for reports. Each report should really be in its own repository. Splitting reports would add another 40 repositories.

So we're looking at $200/month just for my repositories. Throw in what the rest of the company would need, and it is cheaper just to keep doing it ourselves.

There certainly are companies for whom paid Github hosting makes sense--the Github guys are not idiots and if no one was buying they surely would have adjusted things already. I just am having trouble figuring out who those companies might be.
The worst enemy an online community has are trolls. The worst enemy an online community like AirBnB has are psychos and serial killers.

I really don't get this startup. Might as well post "I need somewhere to crash" on Craigslist.
Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital
there's a separate folder in C:\Windows for every supported language? that seems so messy.
Ladies and gentlemen, April Fool's day has arrived (at least in Australia).
I prefer the emacs color-theme 'tangotango':

http://blog.nozav.org/post/2010/07/12/Updated-tangotango-ema...
My favorite is ir_black: http://blog.toddwerth.com/entries/show/8
It should be posted mid-week. I run a developer job board, traffic on Monday/Friday/Weekends is much lower than mid-week.

For whatever reason developers look for new jobs primarily tuesday-thursday.
16 Rules for Success
I'm not personally a fan but isn't GWT an open sourcing of what the use to build gmail, etc? http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Not a Republican, but I think what they are failing to recognize is that these websites are infrastructure in the same ways that highways are infrastructure. Would we bulldoze the Interstate Highway system if we couldn't afford to maintain it?

In the long term there are a lot of potential businesses to be built off the info these sites hold. For example: 379,939 raw and geospatial datasets on data.gov -- that's like 379,939 raw ingredients begging for a recipe to be made. One recipe = one business.

Republicans love business, business, business. So somebody with some brains needs to explain to them how these sites with raw data are good for businesses and potential businesses that can create jobs and grow the economy that they love to talk about.

Unless. . . the actual reason they are getting shut down is because the 'publicans have something to hide and they're worried what that transparency can reveal.
Since when is this crap within the mission of Hacker News? Someone at Y Combinator should get this off the site!
Why Are Larry Page and I So Different (and why didn't Google buy my company)
I've found that when I turn the Internet off I suddenly have so much time it kind of makes me anxious.
IR_White, too! https://github.com/squil/vim_colors/blob/master/IR_White.vim
April Fools Joke? Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple
Poll: Do you chat with others about an article after you read it?
Do you chat with others about an article after you read it?
That's just asinine. Once someone has decided not to go to the theater, the appropriate price comparison isn't tickets + refreshments + babysitter + parking + whatever else people pay for to leave home. For one, nobody spends more than $30 just to see a movie with their spouse. They might spend $30 on a babysitter, $10 on popcorn and refreshments and an extra $15 on the tickets, which seems like an easy win for a $30 rental. However, the key difference is that $30 rental isn't going to watch your kids so you can watch Sex, Lies and Videotape in peace. That rental isn't going to coat itself in salt and butter so you can snack on it while you watch. That rental is really just money you give to sit on your own damn couch (which you paid for earlier), to eat your own damn popcorn (which you paid for earlier) and to worry that your kids will wake up and watch your adult movie (which you'll pay for later in therapy). The comparison doesn't make any sense because the rental gives none of the value they're wrapping up in the "movie night out" experience.
It's just a truism. You make things faster by making them faster.
Sounds like Nomic!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
Google has always allowed early access to privileged hardware partners. They may be changing the terms of that early access, but the access itself is not new. You can argue about whether Android is "open" or not, but either way it's still about as "open" as it's always been.

- Android 1.0 source was not published until one day before it shipped on the HTC T-Mobile G1

- Android 2.0 source was not published until one week after it shipped on the Motorola Verizon Droid.

- Android 3.0 source will not be published until some unknown date after it shipped on the Motorola XOOM.

Not even other hardware partners have access to the source during these early access periods. (I know, because I was working on an Android customization project for carriers and manufacturers at the time of the 2.0 release.)
You can see reviews of the hosts, pictures of the rooms, and compare with other places. That certainly weeds out the psychos and serial killers way more than a random posting Craigslist.
Right. None of which you could reasonably describe as "the most important pieces of its back-end infrastructure," unlike HipHop, Thrift, HBase, Cassandra, memcache, etc. at Facebook. Google has contributed a ton of wonderful products to open source; however they will never contribute BigTable, MapReduce, GFS, Chubby, GoogleBot, their indexing pipeline, the actual reverse index query execution engines, the search engine aggregators, Spanner, etc.

If you think about it, this is all perfectly sensible. Google sees back-end technology as a key competitive differentiator. Facebook needs to build back-end technology, too, but is not as vulnerable to a technologically equal competitor; if we were, Google would have made good on their promise to destroy us by now.

Disclaimer: I'm a Facebook engineer who contributes to the HipHop effort.
GoDaddy goes from racy ads to the truly offensive
Announcing the Try F# Website www.tryfsharp.org
Gandi is slightly more expensive than GoDaddy on domains with no extras, but if you want to anonymize your whois data, the combined price of the domain + the anonymization is cheaper with Gandi than with GoDaddy.
Well maybe they are putting together a better site that makes up for all of those and also enable the citizens to vote and/or give ideas where they want their money spent, or just enable the voters to keep the money if they do not have representation.
My high school physics teacher went to St. John's. We discussed one short part of an original source in physics every Friday.

Notable downside: he didn't know whether purple or red has longer wavelength.
That looks cool, please consider putting your code on github so that others can follow its development.
Leaked: Video of Julian Assange Dancing... lol
The House basically controls funding, but I'd be interested to see who specifically voted in favour of cutting the programmes.