skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know about the pictures thing, but the reputation system works pretty damn well. I buy stuff off of ebay regularly and find that especially high profile sellers do everything they can to keep their reputation up, because otherwise they lose potential clients.

You just really do need to ingrain into the community that a good reputation is essential, damnit, and don't buy from someone that doesn't have one. Then the sellers conform to that.
> they have gone back on what they said.

Point me, please, where did they say Honeycomb will not be opened. As it is now, it probably has some code that went in to meet launch deadlines and that prevents a full release. They may also want to tidy things up before pushing it out because if they push out a defective API (and there are lots of new APIs in HC) they will have a lot of heat when they fix it.
I love this idea. This model could certainly expand to celebrities to capture the interest of the mainstream. Celebrities were largely responsible for Twitter's hockeystick growth.

Side note: I went to my first Grubwithus earlier this week and had a great time. If you have the opportunity, I definitely recommend you give it a try.
How to Fix Google
I'd love to see the Nerds vs Plants mentioned.
Collect HN: Aprils Fools
Given the propensity of april fools jokes among the tech sites, I figured its probably a good idea to collect them in one thread as opposed to being individually submitted.
How far could you go in a discussion like this before BSD grep could reasonably be considered a derived work of GNU grep?

The discussion is going deeply into how GNU grep is implemented so it's clearly not a clean-room reverse engineering kind of situation. On the other hand nothing is being discussed that could be subject of copyright as only ideas and algorithms are put forth and no code is shown. How careful do you have to be to be sure?
I find myself voting for the GOP more and more as the US budget deficit yawns ever larger (please don't hate me for it), so perhaps I can shed some light on the issue.

Most likely cuts to these programs were included in a multi-thousand page budget bill. The Republicans elected to Congress had a choice between two budget bills, one of which spent $30 billion less. Following the will of the voters who granted them a historic electoral sweep in November, they chose to pass the smaller one. The decision to cut these particular programs was made by one of the hundreds of lobbyists, aides, and government agency employees that had a hand in writing the bill.

The congress people who voted for the cuts did not go down the list of federal programs making cost/benefit analyses to decide which programs to cut. Rather, they were presented a large package and asked to make a yes or no decision. Politics is not as rational as the rest of the entries in this discussion imply.

These information programs are tiny for now (though federal programs have a way of metastasizing) and they probably provide more benefit than cost. It is a bad policy decision to cut them, but if the alternative is making no cuts to the budget then the whole package may be worth it.

I agree that $30 billion of cuts does next to nothing to shrink the deficit. Sadly, there is little momentum behind my man Rand Paul’s proposal to cut $500 billion, or Paul Ryan’s roadmap to reduce future Social Security and Medicare deficits. The Republican leadership is playing budget theatre, passing tiny cuts that make them look good without touching the politically sensitive programs that really need shrinking. On the other hand the Democrats are playing budget denial, fighting to keep and expand every line item on the budget. Neither approach is very appealing to me. We need a plausible path to avoid national bankruptcy without raising taxes to uncompetitive levels.
Works for me (Chrome, Ubuntu, in USA)
and the first, spotify closes its EU service in order to launch in the US

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/04/01/spotify-announces-us-lau...
Haha, this is awesome. And fairly accurate.
I love the "Cease and desist - Rovio" testimonial. Wouldn't surprise me if that became a reality since they're selling merch. Awesome idea though.
Absolutely. I was responding more to the "test on your own peoples" aspect of my parent, though on reflection I can see groupthink at a company allowing something like this to get past internal testing. "Dick says it's the next big thing." It's just too onerous not to notice. Like the dog that didn't bark, it's apparently the question that didn't get asked. It certainly couldn't have been 'the change that wasn't seen.'

I think we'd all like to think that people at Twitter are the cutting edge of whatever, Web Scale, but the people who work there are in a bubble of what they're told just as much as people at other companies. When you're in the middle of an industry it's hard to be objective, increasing the odds that something like this would be thought of as a good idea. So whatever, now Twitter's got their own Microsoft Bob. At least it's dead AFAICT.
"You don't actually need to know a lot of the groundwork and the basics to appreciate the exciting bits of mathematics. The more technical things are still awesome as tools and are necessary in some places. But luckily I am usually with other people who do know that stuff."

How about this not being an either/or? Anything that exposes more people to the beauty and power of the maths, and convinces some of them to more of the "technical things" is goodness, IMHO.
yep -- this price will not change. it's a fixed min bid price. we will be clearer next time. thanks!
I wrote a sweet python tool (log parser/highlighter with a web interface) last week that lets my users answer many of the questions they were previously calling to have me look up for them.

Net result: daily time savings for both parties and more time in the zone for me!

That and I now know a lot more about Python than I did two weeks ago.
https://twitter.com/#!/RovioMobile/status/53582855015636992
Damn, I wish this was in a few weeks time, I'm travelling to SF on April 22nd and would've loved to have met both Alfred Lin and Mark Dempster!
Zenburn is easy on the eyes but doesn't offer enough contrast.
I love the Railscasts theme (http://railscasts.com/episodes/258-token-fields for example), which is what I usually use with Emacs.

For iTerm2 I copied over the colors from Visor.app's theme.. but Solarized looks really nice, so maybe I'll soon be using that instead.
Obviously late to the discussion, but surprised no one has posted a link to this famous Orwell essay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_an_Elephant
AIDS/HIV is just a tool, like claw. The predator here is just another human who spreads the virus.
ANA website gets a New Look, rate it!
I was looking for a magazine-style internet business website feel. I think it is a fresh possibly innovative approach to communicating information through a website, "What do you think?" - http://ana.im/press/
After years of dark colorschemes, I'm loving vim-github-theme[1].

[1] https://github.com/acarapetis/vim-github-theme
Cheezburger Network acquires Charlie Stross' blog:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/04/administ...
You might want to try on a trip where it's just you and in a place where you know you can get a hotel if things don't work out. It becomes higher risk when you're bring kids / partner too and have to keep everyone happy.

AirBnB / couch surfing style sites are likely to work better for people with somewhat flexible schedules that can accommodate potentially being stranded and having to find a hotel at the last minute. In exchange for a small risk you meet local people in an informal way that you just can't get if you stay in a hotel.
atlassian gets into mobile gaming

http://www.atlassian.com/en/angrynerds
You can't lose. Lame.
Page Speed and YSlow say Hacker News should:

* Enable gzip compression.
* Specify img dimensions.
* Leverage browser caching: Add Expires headers; Configure entity tags (ETags).
* Minify JavaScript
I am a 24 year old female and in the last three years I have couchsurfered in Europe (alone, with another female, and with a male), found a ride on craigslist from a male (in the US), hitchhiked across France (with a male), and volunteered and lived on farms in Europe (alone and with a male). I had no problems and loved the experiences I had with all of them. The only issue I know of was someone who was a bit rude to one of her hosts because she was prejudiced against staying with someone older than 20. I think that is indicative of the inherent issues with AirBnB-you must have the right mindset to welcome new experiences, be a bit flexible, and make good decisions when choosing a place. It won't be for everyone, or at least the shared spaces may not be for everyone. I have been a huge fan of AirBnB since I learned of them because I think they provide a great (superior to couchsurfing) platform for finding and evaluating hosts and they take away the many of the weird rules that many couchsurfing hosts developed to allow someone to stay with them. They made it financially beneficial to hosts who are providing a great service and seem to have a great support system in place in addition to their information on using the site successfully. I'm excited to try AirBnB in SF when I visit in May, even if my friends stay separately in a hotel, and I hope to hear back from my application to work with them.
HN gives me the impresion of most of the community working on ideas that never get executed. I think its all the articles about procrastination and getting thing done, etc
I really like Mustang: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2758 (Screen: http://hcalves.deviantart.com/art/Mustang-Vim-Colorscheme-98...)
I'd be interested in the code, too.
A brand new phone slightly outselling an old phone on launch day.

golfclap
> I can only assume that the definition of 'obscure' here refers to the vast majority of an mathematics undergraduate curriculum. Which is absurd.

It's not absurd at all. "Obscure" is relative to a given population. The relevant population here is not "mathematicians". The majority is indeed obscure to those outside the field. If you use "inside the field" you get absurdities such as homology being counted as not obscure.

Calculus, and geometry are not obscure. Many non-mathematicians have heard of these, and some even use them. Both group theory and number theory are obscure. I say this as someone who uses the representation theory of groups regularly.
Collecting April Fools
Very strange, are you outside of the USA?
>>make crack legal -----> crack-use increases a LOT

Seriously? You really believe that? Would you, personally, be down at the government crack store buying some rock to smoke today if it were legal (I'm assuming that you currently abstain from doing such things)? I know that on my own list of reasons why I'm not a crack user, the #1 reason is that I have enough self-respect to not want to piss my life away on such things. The illegality of it is entirely irrelevant to my decision. I suspect the real effect of legalization on the prevalence of crack-use in the population would be almost nil.

>>make crack cheaper -----> crack-use increases

Again, I think the vast majority of people who are not currently crack-users would remain that way. Paint thinner is super cheap and easily obtained at the local Home Depot, but we don't see a huge epidemic of ordinary folks deciding to huff toluene on the weekends to get high.

>>increase mental health services -----> small/no effect

I agree that focusing solely on the availability of mental health services would have little effect, but that's not what I'm proposing. You have to also actively promote utilization of those services and work on changing public attitudes about them (get rid of the stigmatization problem) through health education in the schools, advertising, etc.
It's usually not the base system that causes issues. Most instabilities I've come across have to do with distro-specific UI customizations and proprietary add-ons such as Flash.

For example, Ubuntu Natty Desktop Edition will come with Unity as the default UI, which is a relatively immature platform that Canonical is trying to push hard. Linux Mint will probably stick with GNOME and KDE though.

Of course it's always possible to switch to something that is more stable, but that's not exactly "It works out of the box."
The 11 Leadership Styles You Must Avoid
It's a great idea. However, unless I'm mistaken, I believe his auction mechanism is not any of the standard "revenue maximizing" OR "social utility maximizing" mechanisms. The "maximum amount you would pay for this meal" suggests the meal's value to you.

However, for all K=# of seats, his Kth-price auction does not have the property that inputting your truthful value is your dominant strategy. The price should really be the bid of the K+1th person--otherwise, the Kth person can lower his bid in any outcome to the K+1th price/value (in descending order) and still obtain the seat. So it is not even a Nash Equilibrium to submit your truthful value.

So let's see how we can make the auction consistent with the desire to get everyone to bid their truthful value. If instead, the auction price was based on the 9th highest bid (which we assume to be the value) OR the reserve price (whichever one is higher), then it is everyone's dominant strategy to bid their value.

I don't want to rehash examples taught in an introductory Auction Theory class (which I greatly enjoyed), so if you're interested, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction

It's basically a fancy name for what I described, plus a few modifications and extensions.
Indeed, the over the top gags have grown tiresome.
Russian billionaire buys $100M Silicon Valley home
@kmccarth's BostInnovation article "Boston companies using Django" can be found here: http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/31/boston-companies-using-...

Thanks @jtauber for planting the seed for this article.
"All" is an understatement, I didn't see CrowdSavings.com on there!
If anyone else who doesn't know C++ is curious about RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), the C2 wiki article was enlightening: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ResourceAcquisitionIsInitialization

Keep this in mind (from the wiki article):

One problem with the name Resource Acquisition Is Initialization
is that it is inaccurate: it's not always about resources, and
it is nothing to do with initialization -- what makes the idiom
tick is finalization.
Starving entrepreneurs outbidding each other to sit with two rich guys? It is just me or does this seem backwards?
Definitely not the first. Deal aggregation sites are quite possibly a bigger trend than the group buying sites themselves
AirBnB isn't a couch surfing site. It competes directly with sites like VRBO.

I'm not even remotely interested in meeting the typical person who wants to let out a room, but I'm happy to pay a decent premium over a midrange hotel to get an apartment instead of a hotel room, and have been happy every time I've done that.
MyBestBuds.com   (Tech Investors International Opportunity)
MyBestBuds.com
Completed 3rd round of Beta Testing.
Upgraded back end system online debut 60 days.
International monthly recurring billing membership model + SMS monthly recuring. Multiple language + Mapping Features.

Looking for serious technology and marketing team investors. (International) Trademarks/Copyrights in place. Several synergistic properties to work with as well.

Serious investors with strong tech background only.

Contact: Richard@MyBestBuds.com
Thanks very much. Looking back at my early hg repos on this project I refined it for about six months.

As an aside. I have a nominal post in my head contrasting the development and refinement of a colorscheme like this vs the infamous 41 shades of blue. There is room for refinement and testing in design, but I think it has to be coupled with a clear design goals and opinions.
Bitbucket: Free unlimited user source code hosting for university students
jQuery Mobile Alpha 4 Released
I'm planning on installing a transparent proxy that rotates web pages 1-2 degrees with CSS3 transforms.

https://github.com/gcr/proxies/blob/master/rotating-proxy.js
I'm about to start hosting a room in Sydney for a while, any non obvious tips for new hosts? Should I make sure the rooms have locks? I'm leaning towards yes on this already because I think it will just make them feel safer and such, but I don't know anyone else who actually hosts so I'm pretty lost at this stage. Any advice appreciated.
Well how about for starters, Google not placing legal restrictions on interoperability.

Google is even restricting its customers’—namely, advertisers’—access to their own data . . . Google contractually prohibits advertisers from using their data in an interoperable way with other search advertising platforms, such as Microsoft’s adCenter
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-comes-out-of-shadows-w...

And here's "Do No Evil" Google's action in the Skyhook case:
Skyhook and Google are competitors in the location positioning space. There was a time when Google tried to compete fairly with Skyhook. But once Google realized its positioning technology was not competitive, it chose other means to undermine Skyhook and damage and attempt to destroy its position in the marketplace for location positioning technology. In complete disregard of its common-law and statutory obligations, and in direct opposition to its public messaging encouraging open innovation, Google wielded its control over the Android operating system, as well as other Google mobile applications such as Google Maps, to force device manufacturers to use its technology rather than that of Skyhook, to terminate contractual obligations with Skyhook, and to otherwise force device manufacturers to sacrifice superior end user experience with Skyhook by threatening directly or indirectly to deny timely and equal access to evolving versions of the Android operating system and other Google mobile applications.

I know in your world Google can do no wrong, but trust me, they do.
Ultimate marketing?
"Companies are a lot like people."

True; but even more so: Corporations are living organisms; I call them humanoid organisms. http://science1.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/the-realm-of-the-hu... Humans are the domesticated critters of humanoid organisms.
fwiw, there is a high contrast option in the vim colorscheme (let g:solarized_contrast="high").

I'm working on cleaning up some of the build scripts that generated specific files (the mutt directory has an ugly shell script as an example, there are better ways of course).
Try filling out the order form ;)

Rovio was invested in by Accel Partners - the same group that invested $68m into Atlassian. There's a bit of a connection.
And your first statement is so 2011? Associating an idea with a market crash doesn't refute anything, especially since that's not at the core of my point, and I will kindly refer you to the guys at Apple to prove that "eating your own dog food" can actually work, but keep in mind I am no implying that everyone can replicate Apple's success by merely doing this.

As to not admitting it was a mistake... I'm saying you don't apologize for the DickBar. It didn't work, learn something from it, and move on. But clearly, Twitter was far too short-sighted that they didn't even have a backup plan, or competing ideas as simple as... "what would happen if we instead moved the ads to the bottom?" AdMob already bombards many users this way. Would that work?

And as mentioned, I don't have a problem with companies apologizing if they royally screwed up--I mentioned two specific cases where it was warranted. But apologizing every time someone with a blog ridicules a feature/ad model? Not a good sign.
Already discussed someplce else on HN: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/microsoft_google_mon...
Probably while they're bored at their current job...
In the US, the suit would have been thrown out without needing a full trial.
I think Facebook is worried more about scale, hence HipHop. Drupal doesn't scale well at all and shouldn't be used as an example of what's best practice. Otherwise we'd see tons of products having function chains longer than a tapeworm.
How I got my roommate laid for his birthday using social media.
I have a biz partner that finds them because he has the connections. Though we did get one gig because someone found something I'd written on my tech blog.
"According to the analyst’s report, 61% of stores said the two devices were selling at about the same rate, 11% said the iPhone 4 was selling faster and 28% said they were selling more ThunderBolt smartphones than iPhones."

This suggests, but does not prove, that one phone outsold the other. The iPhone could be outselling the Thunderbolt at stores which do more volume, for example, leading to a greater global total for the iPhone. Or when the iPhone outsells the Thunderbolt, it really outsells it.
Something something Color. There, I said it. Now we don't need to humour any cheap jokes.
I like mustang as well, but I keep coming back to desert: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=105
Jason Calacanis sold Mahalo to MS Bing
I am working for "the man" in every sense that that phrase implies: yes, dropbox, facebook, gmail, and tumblr are blocked. And we use ClearCase!

Participating in any sort of forums or outside communication via company equipment during work is completely off-limits (often for regulatory reasons rather than draconian. For example, Hulu and Youtube aren't blocked because, while they're time-wasters, they aren't really venues for communication which has to be logged.)

I wonder how many people would be grouped in the "lurker" bucket not because they don't have an interest in this sort of thing, but because restrictions at work make participation require too much activation energy.
The real question should be which one is contributing the majority of your income. When I worked for "the man" I had numerous side projects (none of them went anywhere), and proudly called myself an entrepreneur. Now that I have my company as my primary income source, I see how naive I was to even consider that what I was doing was real entrepreneurship.
I was disappointed by that as well. They mention in their other video that it retains the optimal temperature for twice the amount of time. It would have been great to see them show that in the video. Hopefully they'll do so in a follow-up.
What is a non-programmer to do?
Ooh! I'm really good at this game!
So, my mind is blown that you put so much effort into designing a color scheme, and thanks, but maybe put the img/ directory in your git repo somewhere else, so that a git pull of a color scheme doesn't take 50(!) megs.
NameCheap are an ex-client (obvious disclaimer) back when they were a lot smaller than they are these days. They were a decent bunch and while always on the ball with marketing, I can imagine there being some genuine feeling behind this - they weren't the type to stick branded caps on African villagers, that's for sure.
What if two Python-based frameworks use $ for separate purposes? (e.g. Django and NumPy)
I was under the impression that reputation on eBay was gameable, so much so that I actively avoid eBay.
Notepad++ is funding Scientology
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/redirect-donation-to-scien...
Fantastic work. If I happen upon some spare time I'll try and port it for TextMate users.
For vi users, I recommend this plugin: https://github.com/mileszs/ack.vim. I like it better than simply replacing grep with ack. This has made me a lot more productive, as I can do complex searches MUCH faster!
April Fools?!?

Now, I'm really angry... nerds...
The most common letters in Hungarian are e and a
the emacs port seems a bit too low contrast

http://dropup.net/lz64u0ctpcge.png.html
The accusation that a script was sighted containing both the pushing-into-hangar scene and the "It's just doesn't work in the real world" conclusion before the cars had even been driven certainly goes to this point.