skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a small application a good friend (https://twitter.com/mikellewellyn - who is a great iphone/mac freelance developer) and I made over the past few weeks.

Do I think this will take over the world? No. I do think its actually rather valuable to a reasonably large market of Hacker News users.

Particularly proud of how the landing page site came out. Will blog reactions/sales etc after a week or two.
Oh, and Apple approved our first submission of this application in under 48 hours, pretty awesome.
Close. I think you counted an extra year in there. It increased 5% at the end of the first year, 7% the second, then 10% the third and fourth. I moved out at the end of my lease after the fifth year, so I don't know what the fifth increase going into the sixth year would have been. It started at $900 and five years later, it was $1,215. That's a 35% increase.

I lived in a more expensive apartment than is typical, but there is no housing anywhere near where I am (only apartments). I don't know if proportional increases are typical all over Denver, though. By the end of the fifth year, I was tired of seeing my rent increase at triple the rate of my raises.
This is really a rather tame rebuttal. Wired and New Yorker are both famous for their popular takes on history and tech and from what I can, having actually not read the Gladwell piece, the complaints seem about on par with what one would expect.
I don't buy the seemingly arbitrary distinction that 8 hours is a good night's sleep. I know people who require 9+ hours per night (ie they appear sleep deprived if they get less than 9 for a few consecutive nights). I know one person who requires about 4 per night (not a forced four where you end up looking 10 years older than you really are after a few years).

I do like the idea of testing where your sweet spot is, though. I've never done anything like the PVT, but I've found (through Steve Pavlina's advice) that if you wake up at the same time each day, every day, and simply fall asleep when you're tired at the end of the day, you discover pretty quickly where that sweet spot is. More here: http://www.ajkesslerblog.com/how-to-get-back-9-weeks-of-your...
My thoughts, also. It used to be that you could reasonably argue the money you'd spend "investing" in a home would be better spent in the market, but that would not seem to be the case, these days. Not to mention, there is now a distinct value to having a roof over your head that is your own that is, perhaps, more emphasized than five years ago.
I've completely stopped going without sleep this since the last semester ended. Of course, we'll see if we last through the next semester...

The thing I've noticed is that I have way more free time than I thought I did, because I wasn't explicitly thinking about things in terms of "hmm, I have five hours before bed, I should probably do X".

Also, melatonin supplements are my friend. :)
Or the "siesta" style of sleep generally. That is, the pattern of having a nap in the day and a shorter nighttime sleep.
Shorter lifespan: http://health.ucsd.edu/news/2002/02_08_Kripke.html

Grey hair: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/foas-nla02230...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464142
WWU: Computer science department needs to step up to the future
Confirmed. Schlage has a relevant patent.

Kwikset also sells an iphone enabled lock, but an extremely cursory search didn't turn up a patent for them.

I wish them the best, but I'm having trouble coming up with a compelling argument to buy from them instead of buying what appear to be more mature, fully-featured products, backed by major lock manufacturers that are pretty well guaranteed not to go away in a year or two.
Computer "Error" Voids All U.S. Green Card Lottery Results
Pressure mounts on WWU to preserve computer science department
Id be glad to. Initially, the best thing to do is master financial accounting. Any financial accounting text book should do (the one i learned from is unique to my school unfortunately, but it was an excellent book, if I find a link to it Ill post it). It sounds tedious, but its pretty important to know this before anything. If you give me an idea of where you are, I could give you more relevant resources. If you are starting from a blank slate, this is the best place to start.
That's not the right way of looking at this.

Instead, consider it from the point of view of probability.

Even if probability of any single programmer writing an exceedingly stupid piece of code is vanishingly small, the number of programmers writing new code daily is so big, that mistakes of vanishingly small probability end up being quite common indeed.

To given a real example: consider that Apple undoubtably employs only the finest programmers for their OS group and yet every iOS release is jailbroken quite quickly due to a piece of code which had a security bug.

Even within a much smaller scope of a single application, all web browser from Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla (and sometimes Google) are regularly compromised via security bugs despite huge investments from all those companies into security.

Toss in the fact that many programmers actually like doing things in unnecessarily clever or novel ways and inevitably the clever code is more likely to be buggy than boring code.

Bugs and crappy code is a statistical certainty, especially in languages like C and C++ that give you so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
In my experience, leases are exactly the opposite. You sign a lease for up to a year and are locked in at a certain price over that year and they do whatever the hell they want to when it comes time to renew your lease for the following year. Your option would be to switch from annual lease to monthly, but you're often looking at paying double the monthly rent, then.
OT, but wow, that site is sure using CPU. I'm seeing my CPU usage go to a consistent 70-99% just sitting on that page (Mac Pro with one quad core Xeon). It looks like it is their Javascript, as it drops to nearly nothing when I disable Javascript and refresh. (I've got Flash disabled, so it isn't their Flash ads). Anyone else have the Javascript go crazy there?
The technology industry needs to think long and hard about ethics.
What an obvious and boring subject.
In rats, at least, absolutely no sleep over something like a month resulted in death. That scenario was completely unnatural, though. They had to be kept awake with electric shocks or something, so I don't think people are physically capable of going without sleep for that long, unless someone is tormenting them.
"Where in the US do second-hand booksellers need a license?"

According to the Institute of Justice (the nonprofit which seems to the primary source here) -- Los Angeles:

http://www.ij.org/citystudies/la

"Even in this age of Amazon.com and impersonal warehouse bookstores, many people still appreciate the intimacy and service of a local and independent used bookshop. Unfortunately, they are a dying breed, and Los Angeles is doing everything in its power to make them extinct. Used bookshops—or “secondhand book dealers,” as they are referred to in the municipal code—are among the 53 categories of business that require a police permit. [109]"

"In addition to complying with the general police permit regulations—e.g., submitting to fingerprinting, paying the applicable permit fee ($263), etc.—they must comply with occupation-specific regulations that create administrative nightmares for purveyors of used paperbacks. [110] For example, every time a used bookshop purchases or receives books in exchange, it is required to “ascertain that the person selling or exchang[ing]” the books “has a... legal right to do so,” then execute a consecutively numbered bill of sale for the purchase or exchange. [...] The Police Commission, in turn, has its own set of rules governing used bookshops. Amazingly, they require that bookshops thumbprint every person from whom they receive a book and file a daily report with the Police Department describing all books taken in that day. They also require used bookshops to hold books for at least 30 days before selling them. [112] Apparently on an ad hoc basis, these requirements are waived for some shops. [113]"
Best Buy's business model is to overcharge people for peripherals like cables and warranties. Their thinking is that when you are buying a big ticket item like a TV, you compare the prices of the item and not the total costs of all peripherals and additional warranties. So Best Buy says "let's have the big ticket item be the cheap thing that brings people in, but then we will get them on the price of cables." And of course their salesmen are trained not to let anyone exit the store with a TV or a computer without buying a bucketful of cables and extra warranties.

So yeah, that's why their cables are expensive, they are their profit center.

It used to be that Radio Shack was a good cheap place to buy cables, but they also raised their cable prices. Radio Shack could have made a fortune just selling cheaper cables to Best Buy customers, but instead they decided that they could compete with Best Buy and raised their cable prices accordingly. Of course Radio Shack stores are way too small to sell big ticket items, so they failed and Radio Shack filed for bankruptcy.

So now the internet is the only place you can get cheap cables.
API documentation isn't the issue. MS has that covered easy. Rather its protocols. And the EU standard is a fair bit higher than say the C standard, because there is no such thing as undefined behavior.

MS must specify what happens in all conditions on all potential configurations of all their systems. I need to look it up but I think its like 50K plus pages of non API docs.
For example, it's sometimes advisable to start from scratch building out page structures, title tags, content, etc. correctly (for example, as I mentioned using a Wordpress structure), and you can often get better results faster by doing this.

I added a blog at some point. It's done in WordPress. The plan is that most new content will go up there, in part just to make my life easier since the old part of the site is such a pain in the butt from so many perspectives.

A webcomic sounds fantastic! Are you any good?

I have no idea. It's still in the concept stage. My 23 year old son thinks in pictures, like Temple Grandin. I did the full-time mom thing and homeschooled both my sons for some years as well, so spent lots of time with my kids. I developed an image-rich speaking style without really thinking about it because that is the most effective means to speak with my oldest. This style of communicating with him has impacted my online writing and I think it is part of why my writing is praised as much as it is. My hope is that this will lend itself well to developing a web comic. I am encouraged that the artwork for XKCD is so simple and that the artwork for a couple of other web comics I know developed enormously over time. My drawing is not that great but I did pursue art as a hobby somewhat as a kid and did have an art class in high school, so I am aware that there are certainly worse artists out there. :-D

I also have a history of being "fascinating" to people (and controversial) and I am hoping this will be a much more positive experience for me as someone in the entertainment space than as someone attempting to share helpful info. The degree to which the focus gets put on me rather than on "these are good ideas to try" has been a huge thorn in my side for many years.

If you can put out something like xkcd.com, then simply add Twitter/Facebook share buttons to it, that can be a quick way to build an audience right there.

Oh, that's awesome. Thank you for that.

I remain frustrated with comic press software and similar. Any ideas on that? I don't really want to grow my own. My coding/web-mastering skills are not that great and, hey, you see what that got me for Health Gazelle. Not really keen to repeat that experience.

Thanks.
Splinter: Python tool for acceptance tests on web applications
I've found Fleet Farm to be reliably dirt cheap for cables. Most of mine have been about $3 or less, which is pretty much un-beatable online.

Otherwise, yeah, cables of any kind are often extraordinarily expensive. Buy online. And, most importantly, avoid Radio Shack.
>Claims that more expensive cables put forth greater video or audio fidelity are nonsense; it's like saying you can get better-looking YouTube videos on your laptop by buying more expensive Ethernet cables.

Fantastic comparison. I'll have to remember that one...
Just throwing this out there: add topicality. Geokit stuff to provide regional jokes, maybe even location based, like, they're near a McDonalds, display Steve Martin's McDonalds joke.
Many of the strange things that happen in C language edge cases come about from macro expansion or code generation.

Unrelated to the issue, but the superfluous parenthesis added in the second example are interesting. I think every C coder has a level of comfort with the 15 sets in the operator precedence rules, and beyond that they throw parenthesis at it. I'm fine with the rules until I use a <<, >>, &, ^, or |[1]. Then I drag out the parenthesis.

[1] I swear the positions of the ones I named are placed alphabetically rather than in relation to their mathematical function.
The More You Know, The More You Don't Know
For no particular reason that I can think of I write modules relating to Chess on CPAN---probably not what you were thinking of, but it fits the description in that I've recently (last few weeks) updated/revised all of them. As to their popularity, well, this is chess, so what do you think? :)
I will no longer buy creative software that has an activation system that hasn't been fully cracked. I've been bit by problems activating legitimately purchased Sony software (I started as a Sonic Foundry customer) and being unable to work on my music. I don't want to find that, 10 years from now, I can't go back and remix an old song because the activation system is offline.
You might try Tumblr for audience building.

The caveats to this advice are that this worked for me a couple of years ago (so I'm not sure if the same community exists there now) and that my thing was much more about fat loss.

Still, I was shocked at how quickly I felt like I had been embraced by a community, especially since I had only started out with the intention of using Tumblr as a free place to host a diary (I was quite ignorant of the community features at the time).

Another caveat is that Tumblr tends to favor short form content rather than longer blog posts. However, this could actually be seen as a positive since it's a lot easier to do shorter, more frequent updates.

Aside from that, finding forums where people are talking about these issues and then getting actively involved could be one of the best ways to indirectly build an audience.

A few thoughts on your website:

* I'd either make your blog the main page or automatically pull in at least the latest blog onto your main page. Otherwise, I get the impression that the site was last updated in 2009.

* I'd write a one paragraph summary of who you are and what you're trying to accomplish, the "elevator pitch" if you will. I feel that a lot of what is on your current main page would be more appropriate on a longer form "About" page. I'd put the elevator pitch front and center so that new visitors can know exactly why they should care and keep browsing your site.

* I'd consider coming up with a short timeline - as a new visitor, I might be interested in quickly knowing things like how far along you are in your journey. Like were you just diagnosed? Have you just recently decided to turn your life around or have you been working on this for awhile? As a new visitor, it helps me more quickly identify with your story and what I can expect to get from you.

To sum up, I think there's an audience out there for this. Plenty of people are going to be interested in the everyday perspective of someone who's down in the trenches battling an illness.

So if keeping the site going makes you happy, don't give up!
I don't know. It's something I know very little about. I speculate that you have to buy a seat or subscribe to a service at a major stock exchange (very expensive) or work through a third party/broker (still pretty expensive, but also less efficient). The reason behind my skepticism is that the only people I know making sustainable (and great) money from it have very deep pockets to begin with or are huge established players.

I was once visiting at a quant fund where they purchased an office building to get physically closer to a stock exchange. It was very expensive real estate and they were a massive fund. They had a lot talented people. Hard to compete with that.

I also read in the Economist a while ago (not sure if its really true, but its believable) that hedge funds are the largest consumers of computer processors in the US. But again, this is something I know very little about. I could be wrong.
I can tell if I've slept less than 8 hours; I can barely function with anything less than 7; add 30-60 minutes if I've exercised intensely the previous day.

The report makes it seem like even if people don't realize it, their performance suffers. I've always been jealous of those that could seemingly sleep for however much time was convenient but not anymore!
Actually no. People do. Heck I even wrote a simple ruby script to help me track when and what I said that caused people to unfollow me, and who it was to see if they important or not:

https://github.com/zbowling/followdiff

The real solution came with lists. Following has always been a vanity thing. There are people that I want to follow but don't want those people to know. Also I want to follow people out of respect but their volume is too high. Private lists give me that solution.
This doesn't account for the inverse case, where content can not be framed in a way that doesn't attract lamers. There are people who will take a crap in the middle of any thread having to do with Obama, for instance.
I was under the impression barbers/hair salons needed licensing for the disease transmission aspects of that job, which can actually be fairly serious.

Whereas a florists license in Louisiana was defended with:
"The state now maintains that regulation is necessary because consumers often phone in orders for third parties and never get to see what they've paid for." [1]

I'm not sure how anyone could defend something like that with a straight face.

1: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2004/scene_joyce...
I've tried a bi-phasic sleep cycle (2 short sleep cycles; 3-4 hours a "day" each time, with a 3-6 hour wake cycle in between) for a few weeks. It worked well enough for me, but with a 10 year old at home, I just couldn't make the timing work out.

I'm one that needs at least 8 hours a night; 9 is better.
Program by Punching
I'm sorry but if you can't immediately realize upon reading that 5 * 60 * 1000 is five minutes, you probebly shouldn't be trying to use window.setTimeout and definitely not window.setInterval.

Not every single thing needs to be wrapped in a jQuery "helper". Doing that just makes the developer using it more reliant on jQuery and less experienced/knowledgeable about straight JavaScript.
I'm not sure why this gets brought up with Dropbox.

Of course it's possible to provide a service which only receives and stores encrypted data. At that point Dropbox would cease to exist. Half the posts about dropbox are lauding it for doing one simple thing well. Your Dropbox/ folder is shared with no fuss.

The other half of posts about dropbox are ribbing on it for not being secure enough.

Here's a clue: If I had to carry an private key with me to decrypt data stored in dropbox i might as well just carry the data.
Ask HN: Conversion rate of a "commercial" landing page
Hello,

I'm looking into online advertising at the moment. My project is based on a Yearly subscription model. 15$ / year to be exact.

I've done some advertising for a free service where you only required to input your username, email and Password with no email validation and my conversion rate was around 25%.

With an appropriate landing page with some A/B testing what kind of conversion rate should I expect for a commercial "product"?

Cheers,
As a student and an amateur developer working for a magazine startup, my schedule is chaotic and busy. Doesn't help that I go through days and sometimes weeks of just laying in bed and watching babylon 5 DVDs. Sometimes the only thing that can snap me out of it is an impending deadline. I'll then end up stressed as I try to complete my workload. Needless to say, my burndown charts are skewed.

I feel the chaos of a startup doesn't help things. I long for a structured 9 to 5 job in an office. Being alone at home just exacerbates things and having a bed behind me just makes me want to crawl under the covers and sleep. I tried going to various cafes to work but there's no free wifi (which I suppose I wouldn't use anyway) and the prices are ridiculous. Libraries are great when they aren't packed and when the homeless aren't using it for shelter.

I have to admit I do have a sudden burst of energy when I stumble across an interesting github repo.
> Note that the text is in fact correct because it differs slightly from the formula.

Afraid not. When it said "taking the square root (which is the inverse of the square operation)", it was incorrect for implying that the square operation has a single inverse.

See also: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SquareRoot.html

And note their use of scare quotes when talking about "the" square root.
When I rented last, my lease switched to month-to-month if you didn't sign up for a new term, too. It went from (at the last number) $1,200/mo under lease to something like $1,900/mo without a lease.
What doesn't...
In Spain we have as in Canada , one for blank CDs and DVDs, but also for mp3 and video players, recorders, memory cards and non-primary hard disks ( when you buy one you always say it's going to be primary in the computer if the shop asks for it). Till now it only serves for some people justifying piracy and for others getting richer. Even the EU said that was illegal because even the businesses and public services had to pay for it, now that they don have to pay , the SGAE (local RIAA) says they want a compensation, but they are not going to give back what they have got in excess, and the government won't ask for it either. The politicians at the corporation service.
On OS X:

beats song.txt song.wav && afplay song.wav

Provides really quick feedback. On Linux you could probably just use aplay. No idea for windows?
Honestly.com – Not acting so honestly
"I've completely stopped going without sleep this since the last semester ended"

That is a lie.
In the US, you have fixed-rate mortgages and adjustable-rate (ARMs). Fixed rates are usually 15 and 30 years. The longer the term, the lower your monthly commitment, of course. I believe a 30yr fixed rate is probably the most common type of mortgage. I don't know the details of the ARMs, but a lot of people were suckered into those which is why a lot of people are having huge problems, these last few years. If you get as much or more house than you can afford so that you're just getting by every month and a few years down the road, your rates jump, you're screwed.

My fixed mortgage is fixed for the life of the loan (until 2040), so over time, the percentage of my income dedicated to paying my mortgage will continue dropping.
The general phenomena of which they are taking advantage is called anchoring - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring