skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't know about this. In my experience the best way to take fear out of a codebase is to have a rigorous unit testing and continuous build platform. I've got no problem with refactoring but would like to think it has a bit more of a design element to it. Perhaps time is better spent fixing defects - another good way to learn a codebase and a more productive excersise in our time constrained projects.
So now the sister of a programmer being arrested at a political rally qualifies as Hacker News? The signal to noise ratio here decreases every day. sigh
That's crap. Check out his sex tips for geeks!

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/
Challenging, but approachable. That's a good characterization of 'Concrete Math'.
Scoble: 72 Nice Things About Demo's Startups' Websites
A script to help with Rails - Merb conversions
Thank you for the clarification. I had actually misspoke; I meant we had replaced a (relatively) large amount of Republicans with Democrats, as well as gained a majority in both houses. However, yes, even with majorities we can't ever get anything done because of the way the senate and vetoes were designed, regardless if you think the design is good or bad. My interests in political science classes at university have taught me to be far more cynical and pessimistic about our entire government... :(
Tutorial on Building Web Apps with Merb and CouchDB using the RelaxDB ORM
I like your reply more than the quote I stole.
Whoever you give them to, we can bring up your generosity wherever anyone doubts that lispers are nice people.
And cheaper Einsteins.
Are mechanical pencils better for the environment than the regular wooden kind?
The Only Scooter You Will Ever Need
Nonsense. How often would someone need to buy expensive, crappy music before they realized that the price is not an accurate signal of whether they will like it? Particularly in the case of music in which it is not difficult to hear it before buying it.
Took me a while to notice this is actually from October 2000. Nevertheless interesting, and here's the scientific article: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/290/5490/350
I will hijack your shipment of books, and commit myself to studying them for years. After a long absence, I will emerge from my hideaway armed with a thorough understanding of Common Lisp. I will write a single macro, more profound than the deepest koan, more concise than the Reader's Digest Condensed Edition of a haiku. When executed, this macro will generate the source code to a second program -- a program so powerful it will be a Google killer that evolves into a Google killer-killer, all while running on a single 386, even if it isn't plugged in. My Series A will empty Fort Knox, exhaust the New York Fed, and leave me with the Crown Jewels of a thousand forgotten dynasties.

I will sell some of these on ebay, and donate the profits to charity. Top that.
3 times total http://searchyc.com/submissions/Young+Procrastinator
That's an interesting criterion, but there are plenty of "traditional" desktop apps who keep data server side (any thin-client DB program using ODBC, subversion clients, etc).

Even IMAP email clients I suppose.

So is a web app "something which keeps primary data on a server, and uses the HTTP protocol to read+write it"?
Indian freedom strugglers
It's tempting to flag this - politics not hacking. However, North Korea is interesting in a special way - because it's so extreme. It's like one of those exercises where you run some code the way it's not meant to be run with the idea of "I wonder how far we can push this". Starving people, no foreign relations, extreme corruption, yet still it chugs along as it has for two decades. The horror is resiliant.

> Supposedly, schoolchildren there are taught that both
> Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are superhuman beings that
> do not exercise the same bodily functions that
> conventional humans do.

I think it's a lot more practical than this. North Korea is like one of those systems where you've deleted all the source code but the process is still running. So long as you don't stop the process, and can keep the power running, it just ticks along. Of course, you can't make change beyond that provisioned for before the problem developed. So.. you just run with it because you don't have any other options.

The interesting thing is - if it collapses the results could be profound for all of us. The south feels a strong companionship to the people in the north even though, for practical purposes they now have very little in common. The south is prosperous.and educated and liberal. Currently the humanitarian crisis is hidden behind the parallel, but as soon as the state flounders in the north then countries around the world (locals like the south, China and possibly Russia) will feel obliged to help, and the west will probably play a role too due to their close historical relationship to South Korea.

North Korea is a two-state society - the ruling group, and the rest. The ruling group will do whatever they can to stay in power. In the west, I wouldn't believe that a lie like this could be sustained. I've met people from former eastern-european countries who really do know how to keep a secret, and to separate their clan lives from their public face. Even if he's still alive then it's an amazing situation for the resolve he has shown to avoid the mistake (on a selfish level) of attempting gradual reform in a system that is beyond it.
Dvorak has always been a pessimistic, glass is half empty commentator on technology. 99% of the time he's wrong.
"Haikus are easy,
but sometimes they don't make sense.
Refrigerator."
Google Chrome == spyware tool :Logistics company warns developers.
Below is the mail sent from the swizz HQ of logistics company Kuehne+Nagel about Google Chrome to their developers. The company is planning to ban Chrome across their network.For Your Entertainment:

[quote]

ON SEPTEMBER 3rd, 2008 GOOGLE LAUNCHED HIS NEW BROWSER "GOOGLE CHROME". ECHO IN TECHNICAL PRESS IS DISUNITE. THE RANGE VERIFIES FROM "EXCELLENT" UP TO "DISASTROUS".

The facts are ;
1. Google Chrome is a beta version!

2. One day after launch major vulnerabilities were detected.

3. Google Chrome read each character typed in and stores it for later use by Google. A perfect spyware tool.

4. Google Chrome creates an identifier for each installed browser and sends this to Google.

This allows Google to create user profiles etc.. Analysts says the identifier has the same impact then social identification number.

so most corporate's are blocking Google Chrome ....

http://www.kn-portal.com/

[/quote]
3G iPhone video gym?
fitness takes (and makes) brains, not brawn. We're building the world's first utility. What would get developers to use it? See PaceFit.com
Every version of a particular song offered for sale is identical, so it is easy for people to figure out that price is not a significant differentiator. Most products aren't like that. It is relatively hard to know the quality of an Accounting package before you buy it and use it extensively, for example. In that sort of context, price does often send a signal about what market niche you are aiming for.
Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility
It's still a poor term for positive reinforcement...
I've enjoyed reading On Lisp on-line, but would like the book so I can read in the bathroom. It's not worth $150+ for that convenience though.
Well a few things:

a) We now have dozens of different forms of propulsion(gas, ethanol, biofuel, CNG, electricity, hydrogen etc)
b) We now have FWD, AWD, RWD
c) We now have cars that have 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16 cylinders
d) We now have cars that come naturally aspirated, turboed, supercharged, twin turboed, twin supercharged ,quad turboed.
e) We now have cars that can take a hit at 100 mph, and you'll survive
f) We now have cars that can do a 0 to 100 in just a couple of seconds.
g) We have cars that will adjust the suspension based on a hairline crack in the road.
h) We now have cars, that can go up a 89 degree slope, in the snow(Audi/Subaru AWD systems)
i) And of course our cars now come better equipped than CEO offices from when they first came out.

But yes space program needs to make space a commodity. Where you can walk to your roof, get in your personal space ship and go pickup your buddy on Sirius 3 to go that hot new restaurant on Mars.

And it could probably be done, just 100 years ago cars were a thing for the richest of the rich. Now everyone has one.
World’s First Hybrid SUV Stretch Limo
Someone was wearing that shirt at demo day. Love it
The thing is, I don't think people always work like you're describing. Some people might actually look to the price of the song, if only unconsciously, to help decide whether they should like it. Especially if the song is popular, and price indicates popularity. Then it's not just a matter of liking a song, but of fitting in and being hip.
Good scams, bad scams, and terrible scams
If you want people to comment and/or vote you up, you need to provide a lot more meat..

Also, I absolutely abhor any website that dares to resize itself to full screen. Please pass a hearty "fuck you" from me to your web designer.
Don't know, but if both doubles should turn up alive in the same room and you need to know which is the real one, step on the cat and see toward which double she flees. Be sure to check for a cat double though.
Fannie, Freddie and You: What It Means to the Public
Copycats.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106673/
I love how our president will veto water resource development and chant the infantile "offshore drilling" mantra when parts of our nation are experiencing very real and prolonged drought.
fail fail animalia
first "fitness" utility
The core dumps are also a nightmare.
I would have thought that a short would be sufficient.
Heh, I hadn't noticed either, just picked it up in the cogsci subreddit.
I bought some Pilot G2 pens... they're too nice to chew on. It's the only way I could hope to stop chewing on things.
Rabbits with lasers -- they'll overrun any country in a Hitchcock-esque nightmare within months (assuming either the lasers are genetic or they're super smart).
I like the feedback. Will get it changed; great point!

We are going to undo the myths, expense, and wasted time of hiring perdunal trainers at the gym by providing short, 3 minute, video-based training once daily. Login, learn, then workout on your own time!
"personal" sorry, typing from iPhone
Actually, it's probably more along the lines of the Future Soldier initiative -- maybe a viable exoskeleton or an advance in materials towards that end.
I love those old Joel posts.
It's a pitty he stopped writing about anything interesting once he sold enough copies of FogBugz..
Google Chrome: A Masterstroke or a Blunder?
I use a US "golden dollar" coin. You can see it in the picture there, on the notepad, next to the HP-48g. RPN is very soothing. :)

I used to use a German "5 mark" coin, but lost it in a move a few years back.
Social Bookmarking Trends: Top Sharing Activities
Analysis of recently released reports by ShareThis & AddThis bookmarking widgets.
The Cathy lady he asks for opinions is his wife. Not totally unbiased, then.
Why developers are dumping PHP for ColdFusion
At least he praises every good work, not just his. He is quick to praise PG (check out his Software page, he implemented a filter) and anybody else who has done something cool...including himself.
I missed the first post so this is a worthwhile re-post.
It was my impression that he was locating an access point and not the phone. What he is doing is tricking the iPhone into thinking it is located where the victim's AP is because it sees an AP with the victim's MAC address.

I'd question whether or not he has actually tried this. If you read how the skyhook service [http://www.skyhookwireless.com/] works, it says it uses a combination of wi-fi, GPS and cell towers. So in order for it to show you a wrong location based on a single cloned access point you would need to shield the iPhone's GPS, and GSM antennas and then hope the software is naive enough to estimate your location based off one data point.
But what happens then is that municipalities are going to need to coordinate their actions. They set up higher level bodies and those set up even higher level coordinating entities. You get a pyramid of layers delegating power and the entire thing becomes intransparent and corrupt. That's how the the soviet union "worked". "Soviet" actually means "workers council" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_%28council%29). To a lesser degree that's what the EU suffers from. Citizens have no way of influencing the most powerful institutions directly and therefore these institutions seem remote and aloof.
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/

Chrome isn't much faster than the others.
Is Google spreading itself too thin?
You do know aboutthe Turing test right?

With all the searching and interactions on the internet these days I think there will be plenty of feedback from humans to develop AI if it can be done.
Seedcamp finalists to be announced
...and makes it nearly impossible to separate the crap from the CRAP!
I have been losing sleep trying to find out what the missing figures from the online edition actually look like. Please put me out of my misery.
Four categories of of web brochure suckage.
Just like artists? Artists seem to procrastinate a lot and say they're just waiting for inspiration...
It does show that he was pressed for time.

I don't think deadlines help you focus, because fearing that you won't make it and thinking that you could have done a better work make you nervous.
Right.

And does this strike you as a bail out of the shareholders derived from an entirely understandable desire to avert the consequences that would attend their financial losses?

Or, does it strike you as socialist capitalism. That is to say, the socialization of risk . . . and the privatization of reward?
Payola: Could an old idea save online radio and the music industry?
"1.It's a step toward developing a browser that could eventually be incorporated into a Google operating system"

I'd say that browsers have become operating systems in their own merit, at least the part of the OS that's relevant: the client-side GUI. The rest is hardware and config tools. Offering a complete browser as BSD is like offering a multiplatform GUI toolkit for all programmers out there. If I'm not mistaken, it's being realeased for Windows only, but the rest of platforms are expected soon.

Mozilla's Gecko has some rough edges, like C++-centric interface. If Chrome solves that, it could became a platform in itself very quickly.
Ffwd launches a Last.fm for video
question: are most companies then also blocking all google products, since they basically are all also beta versions that do similar things? gmail will track and store your emails and use them to serve you ads. google toolbar tracks your browsing habits, etc..
Pentagon debates development of offensive cyberspace capabilities
Is he really selling DVD's about the companies summer internship program?
Back in the olden days there were clipping services, pay a fee and each week/month a selection of xeroxed articles would arrive in a plain manila envelope.
seriously? those are the reasons?
SSD vs. 7200rpm
No sound is needed.
Google & Microsoft will both do very well, indeed. Even then we will have a decent business if we execute well.

First, we are much smaller, so it takes a lot less to be successful. Second, even in the face of the most successful business on the planet, Intuit and Adobe succeeded well. Third, monopolies are exceptionally rare, and fairly transient - so Microsoft's Windows/Office monopoly is likely to prove to be the exception than the rule, even for Microsoft itself. Linux on the server side, Mac on the client, Firefox/Chrome in browsers ... all point to that.

Dell is an outstanding success, and still only holds somewhere under 20% of the global PC market. That's what I expect to be true in cloud computing.

Bottomline: there are going to be many players with many successful strategies.
Ok, putting it in my calendar :)
Saving yourself from fake diet pills
Most of us make the same mistake when it comes to the selection of the right diet pills by trying a new diet pill without proper review prior to ordering the product. When we use fake diet pills we do not see any results or sometimes we even face serious side effects. After this we start raising questions about the quality of the product, reputation of the company and nature of the side effects etc.
Now there are super-resolution techniques that allow you to see beyond the diffraction limit.
The Ultimate Football Network At TechCrunch50
It's open source. How tough would it be to make a fork that did not do these things?
Joel's argument makes sense in theory, but in practice it doesn't add up at all. You can preview music, get a feel for what it's like, regardless of the price. On a movie, you're relying on other people's opinions, but from 30 seconds of preview you can usually establish if you like it or not (and if it's a band you always buy the music from - you don't care anyway).
Ask YC: Excel Generation (Server Side)?
I was curious to know if anyone could recommend a component for server side excel generation (both xls and xlsx) for an ASP.NET application. We cannot install Office on the server. We've been using this component from codeplex...

http://www.codeplex.com/ExcelPackage

...and we haven't been thrilled with it. We're open to a commercial solution - we're just not sure what the best option is.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Not to mention that one person's opinion is not data. The best way to find out what your partner wants is either to ask or experiment. Much better than listening to ESR. :)
And if by buying overpriced music, the person feels like they're "fitting in" and are "hip" then what's the problem? They're not being ripped off. They're getting $2.50 (or whatever) of smugness / well-being / hipness.
He was, yes.
I don't know if the internet changes everything about this, but in the old days of retail, the discounted stuff is always grouped together, all the $4.99 albums in a bin, the $6.99 albums have "Great Value!" stickers, and so forth.

You also get a flyer in your Saturday paper bragging about the low prices on these ten albums at Best Buy or whatever. Same thing, they are signaling that they all have equal value.

So in retail price is signal in conjunction with a bunch of other stuff. But again, that may be irrelevant in the age of iTunes and Amazon.
Uranium Ore for sale
Announcing The TechCrunch50 Finalists
Fair enough. But the people that need basic advice like this might not be aware of the term, and might not read the article as a result.
there are php frameworks that replicate coldfusion's declarative benefits.

Anyway, this article is awful. Last I heard, the trend is for CF developers to migrate to .Net/PHP and not the other way
It's really the only knock I have against Python ;/
I disagree. What if you make something free? Does that make it seem crappy?

I don't think pricing is a signal. It is a barrier - how high a barrier would you like to set for you customers.
Is it wrong that I just want to turn off my feed reader until DEMO and TC 50 are over?

It'd be much cooler if the winning company automatically got acquired or something.

To me a huge conference to announce your launch is like throwing a huge celebration at the START of a marathon.
Many (most? the vast majority?) of people who go to the movie theater will see a movie even if the movie they intended to see is sold out. Plus, they are not price-conscious. So, it makes sense to keep all the movies at a high price so that the customers end up paying high prices for movies they didn't go to the theater to see. "A rising tide lifts all boats." If they went to the theater to see a particular movie, and it was sold out, they will pay for some other movie this weekend and then try again next weekend (and the next next weekend if necessary) until eventually they see the movie they originally intended to see. LoTR is sold out three weeks in a row = many customers bought three or four movie tickets, instead of just one.

If they were price conscious, they would rent it for a dollar from RedBox when it comes out on DVD. Or, they would go to the discount movie theater to see it for $4. Or, they would download it for free off the internet.

On iTunes, there is no such thing as "sold out." And, everybody is price-conscious because everybody under 30 knows you can just get the songs for free off the internet if you are willing to put up with the hassle. Apple has recognized that people value that hassle at approximately $0.99. If people were willing to pay $2.49 for a song, it wouldn't mean that the song was better than a $0.99 song. It means that they would probably pay $2.49 for every song, since they value the convenience at about $2.49.
In makes sense in practice too. I'll never touch a bargain bin of CDs at a store.
Wine. At a restaraunt. Sure, it's a textbook example - but that's because it's so common. People don't want to buy the cheapest wine - so they get something from the middle of the list.

Price can send a signal about the STATUS of the object - and this can be more powerful than any signals about the quality!
Top 10 iPhone Apps for Techies: Cydia, OpenSSH, NES, Drinks...
If something is expensive, you ask yourself "what justifies this price", with the expectation of greater quality, features, stability, support or whatever.

If something is free, you also ask "what justifies this price", but this time you expect things to be missing, flawed, incomplete, contains viruses, etc. You're instantly looking for whats wrong, not whats great.

So, yeah, pricing is a signal.
126 points - top page for a few days.. yeah - looks like everyone else loved it as well. :)
Ah, but if that were generally true of public perception, bargain bins wouldn't exist.
5 Tips for Quick & Dirty Prototype Mockups in PowerPoint
Congrats to DropBox!

(I didn't notice any other YC companies)
Winners: Blah Girls, Connective Logic, DropBox, Grockit

Curious: Angstro, Imindi, Popego, Swype, TrueCar
akoha
Those kids probably don't have any "fuck you" money. and as you say the charges against the cops didn't stick. Dare I generalize and say that charges against cops usually don't stick.

So what's the solution? I'm not sure, the best thing I can think of is 1 year terms for elected police chiefs. Police too hard or too soft, lose the election. Police just right, stay in office another year.
Usain Bolt
The Rise of the Numerati
Popego = FriendFeed 3 times more visual.

Connective Logic doesn't even have a website...
Icharts. Simple idea, Huge need.
hosteurope.de is very cheap and has excellent VPS deals.
Blocking an advert when viewing an ad supported website is stealing.

You are stealing bandwidth, processing power, storage, electricity, etc

Society is about give and take. Adblocking is about take.
Hmmm...

4+ sure, but more then 6hrs. in a day and I start introducing bugs and end up with negative productivity.

Yep on #2 and #3

Yep on C++ and Python, I still have not gotten to haskell, but I really do want to because I used to write specs in predicate calculus.

Doom was my game, Q3 blew my mind, but I have not gamed in years.

I am indeed interested in computer graphics, and I've done a bit of OpenGL for bioinformatics.

What you offer sounds interesting, but where the heck are you located?
Yes it is, but to tar every website with the same brush is not very nice IMHO.

You are assuming that all websites are going to waste your bandwidth, show you irritating adverts, and piss you off.

I think it'd be a nicer world if you assumed websites were going to be nice and useful. If a website does have bandwidth wasting ads, just don't use that website.
Connective Logic: I'm basing my opinion on the problem domain that they are tackling, which is making it easy to write software that takes advantage of multi-cores

Popego: If it's like Friendfeed, then ba humbug. I expected more from their description of "most meaningful information"