skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is unit testing doomed?
The Rise and Fall of a Graduate School Applicant
or you may have to replicate it 60 times
One Step Closer to 'Invisibility Cloak"
LevelHead- Augmented Reality Game (watch the demo video)
All other variables held equal, the more my money reserves and influx grow in proportion to my obligations and outflow, the more comfortable I am--with diminishing returns, of course. The part that gives money the "doesn't make you happy" reputation is that obligations usually grow as income does, and often other variables vary.
We could start with the tiniest bit of grace about the thing. JustinTV is not a threat to televised olympic coverage. Whats going on here is just plain bullying.

The games are for everyone, form every nation. That means some people might want to watch it on ARD, auf Deutsch, but live in California. Some people will catch some interesting stuff on their cellphones and want to share. Its about the world now, and its not 1960. I'm not saying we shouldn't have advertising sponsors, I'm just saying we should grow up a little about it.
AMD and Intel hate each other with a hatred as hard as that of Hamas and the Israelis.

A metaphor in poor taste to kick off this lengthy article.
Conditional-CSS allows you to write maintainable CSS with conditional logic
Look through back issues of Inc. They do articles on this sort of thing a lot, and it will give your friend a good idea how other people grow their companies. It sounds like he needs a strategy more than a coach.
Small Business Willing to Pay $1/Tweet to Send Ads
I never believed that "timing the market" was possible so much as I believed that you can leverage other peoples hype to your advantage. BTW, I also made a couple of bucks in the hyped real estate fiasco, and then bought a condo on Lake Winnipesaukee, and then stopped. The difference is that most people over leverage themselves and keep going for "one more fix". Again, rather than being greedy in highly unstable markets I chose instead to get in and get out, in theory I'm leaving money on the table, in reality I'm just taking advantage of things to my benefit and leaving my "real" investments to a more sane and logical strategy.
Wow. I suppose I should take the article to task for being one sided. But then there are more than enough wholly negative articles out there; one leaning the other way is past time.

If OLPC really has sold that much, in the hundreds of thousands already, then it's probably past the point where it can be killed. And if that many users doesn't let OLPC fix/improve sugar then they'll be kids in those hundreds of thousands willing can hack on it themselves.
This doesn't ring true to me.

I've never found any reference to VisiCalc being written in Lisp -- there's no reference to that at all in either Dan Bricklin's site or Bob Frankston's site:

http://www.bricklin.com/visicalc.htm

http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=implementingVisicalc

In fact, I've heard stories about wrangling assembly code to make it work.

Can anyone verify this?
Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood ideas
My wife took this course and adored it.

I just bought all the books, so I don't know. The books are very nice, as you may already know. I will say that owning all the books already makes me more hesitant to take the course, though by all accounts Tufte is a great presenter.
People do act rationally. But it's a small minority of the time!

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. We tend to act rationally a lot of the time. But those are often "no brainer" situations where there is little question about the best option. The 6 factors in the article come in to play when decisions are less clear.
Um, or they can just ask if you knew. Not putting it in writing only counts if you're going to back it up with lies in court. Otherwise, if you knew, you knew.
Adhearsion - next killer app for Ruby?
Reminder: A few spots still open for the Cambridge/Boston Startup Meetup tonight
as noted, google alerts, twitter,

worth mentioning and used daily: compete,

tools: page rank checker, back link analyzer, paid link analyzer, supplemental index ratio analyzer
Drop.io Injects Steriods Into Twitter
I am taking it in October in DC. My manager took it and loved it.

I saw Tufte's books on her desk and started ranting on about how much I love his work and asked if she was a `fan' as well. Turns out she just took the course because other management were too, but she loved it as well.
Card-counting whiz eyes Facebook football fantasy  social network
"Apple’s system is much better, but Windows, through sheer Microsoft muscle, has been made to appear necessary."

Wow, biased much?
I am actually surprised this article made The Times Online proof-reading/editorial process given its poor writing style, long length (without focus), rambling nature, clichés, bias, and especially given the authors bio (http://www.bryanappleyard.com/bio.php). Not meaning to be negative, just surprised.

Nonetheless, it is good to see OLPC and such projects get mainstream media attention and more awareness.
I liked it better boiled down and including a story about a Persian rug.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=270145
Surf Jack
Interesting idea. The name needs some marketing consulting.
MockMe: A new JavaScript mocking framework
Doctor campaigns for iPhone drug application
I am suspicious of this Bhanwara character. There was a post of his on HN a little while ago about how Visicalc was written in LISP that didn't ring true, and now he claims to have taught RMS the philosophy of Free Software. Every one of his stories is about how he could have been an amazing success if it wasn't for some factor outside his control, like people scheming against him. I think what we have here is a Walter Mitty character.
>If it were a dramatic difference in lifespan...

Maybe. But lefties could easily die, say, 10 years earlier on average, in theory, and still have plenty of time to pass on their genes.
Someone should make a T-shirt that says "I'm an outlier data point."
Well it's the opposite in the U.S. Mileage decreased for the first time ever last quarter, which is leading to less tax revenue to repair the roads. The most efficient tax would be tolls, but the implementation is a nightmare.
PC Industry Scared Netbooks May Hurt Laptop Sales
Servers: Why Thrifty Isn't Nifty
Better (but less simple) idea

Get an MPG benchmark, say 25. Give a tax credit for cars that overperform and a tax debit for cars that underperform. This creates a revenue-neutral incentive structure that would help cycle in more efficient cars into the market. Every so often, raise the benchmark.

Of course you have the problem with fleet vehicles which are always going to be below the benchmark, but they could rotate into natty as a source.
I did the same using Summize (before it got acquired), and every 2 minutes there would be a tweet about the keywords I target. But be careful one could consider it spam, so I would suggest you read their tweet and respond accordingly.
The article was so-so, but these are worth the price of admission:

- The system works because Chuck Norris tells it to work

- Chuck Norris doesn't need a test suite. The test suite needs Chuck Norris.

- CPUs run faster to get away from Chuck Norris

- Chuck Norris normalizes all schema just by inserting random data

- Chuck Norris can compile syntax errors

- Packets travel faster than the speed of light for Chuck Norris, but he can still catch them

- Chuck Norris has Internet 3

- Check Norris can parse invalid XML

- Chuck Norris can break Moore's Law

- Chuck Norris's brain is his revision control, and it works better than git
The only problem with taxing energy is that it has a disproportionate effect on the lower classes.
The course is definitely worth it. Tufte is a great speaker, and watching how he presents ideas, evidence, etc is a valuable experience. The books are supplemental to the talk, and they end up feeling more like development materials to be explored in greater depth... highly recommended.
He doesn't know what he is talking about; in that every company I know of, will have a build-vs-buy discussion before blindly going ahead and building their own DC.
Why is that a problem? The planet doesn't care about the socioeconomic status of polluters, does it?
Oh thanks, I didn't realise. :)
Yes, that works if you ringfence the taxes, but almost no-one does - we certainly don't here in England (IMHO we should, indeed we are insane not to).
If they used flash, this story would seem ridiculous:
--

Adobe will offer U.S. Web surfers this month thousands of hours of free video direct from the Olympics in Beijing.

The service, produced in conjunction with NBC, is being hailed as a bold experiment in delivering on the original promise of the Web. For the first time, it will be possible to watch specific events on demand as well as many of the less popular sporting events, which have received scant attention in mainstream television coverage of the games.

But there's a catch. To view the video, it will be necessary to download a Adobe Web browser software component based on a new proprietary technology, Flash, that is intended to make it possible to display interactive animations, graphics, audio and video, all within a fixed window inside a Web browser display.

Flash will work for both Macintosh and Windows PC users, and a version for Linux is also available. A mobile version will be available on Windows Mobile and Nokia smartphones.
Small businesses and thinking big
Coping With Internet Explorer's Mishandling of Buttons
Looks quite a lot like the Sass markup: http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/rdoc/classes/Sass.html
This is a bad rehash of "The Power of Persuasion" by Robert Caldini. One of the best sales books I've ever read.
The Evolution Of Sega: A Conversation With Sega America's CEO
I think it speaks volumes of the Sugar/Linux/Open Source movement that given all this funding and laser focus on features/purpose they still can't come up with something that's usable and mostly bug free.

I'm not a hater, just disappointed that in 2008 Linux is still struggling to break into the desktop market.
IPhone Apps: One Month And 60 Million Downloads Later. But Not One Of Them Is A Killer App
very good insight into the importance of engagement data from Gregor Hochmuth, whom i should meet next time i'm in Berlin.

Bastian
Who says the best coders work for governments?
I attended the Tufte course a few years ago and it was fantastic. I enumerate the following reasons:

1. The 4 books alone are worth almost $200

2. He's one of the most engaging speakers you'll ever see: you're ability to present will improve.

3. Book porn. He brings antique copies of Galileo and shows them off.

4. Inspiration.
Balsamiq Studios LLC is slowly earning hero status in my eyes. Peldi's entrepreneurial spirit is contagious.

The major problem with this form of advertising is that it takes a person with tact, diplomacy, and self control to do it right. If Twitter supports the '$1 / $$ message' universally it will attract many advertisers lacking any if all of those characteristics. That could result in a diluted user experience and eventual spamization of the system.

Still, in its purest form (and micro doses), this is a great way to perform grassroots marketing.
I'll second that, and it goes beyond mere marketing. For example, you're outside at some group event, say, a concert, and you find yourself having a heart attack. What do you do? Do you call for help? "Help, I'm having a heart attack!" That might work, but what works better, according to research, is to call out to a single individual. "You, sir, in the red shirt, yes you! Help me, I'm having a heart attack." This is due to the phenomenon known as "pluralistic ignorance," where a group of people will collectively do nothing in response to some threat/problem, because they're collectively looking around at each other to see what to do (and they see each other doing nothing but looking around...) By singling out someone, you break through the group psychology.

The book emphasizes the subconscious and automatic nature of influence techniques. You may think "oh, I'm rational and can't be manipulated," and you would be wrong. Only becoming aware of them can you have some hope of avoiding them.
IPhone 3G Unlocked
If I had to choose sides, it would be Microsoft every damn time. Why? I'm a web designer/developer and the software suite I use everyday from Adobe costs roughly $1000 (every 2 years because I skip generations). The operating system I use everyday (even when I'm not designing) cost me at most a couple hundred dollars (prob less because it's pre-loaded)

Adobe is just plain greedy, which is criticism that could be applied to MS as well, but dollar for dollar MS is raping me much less.
About AI and neural networks
Paris Hilton on MySpace('s CEO)
Microsoft worried over .NET fragmentation
Have you every written assembly language on punch cards? That was, in fact, the toolchain in use for OS/360. No editor: you either write them and hand them to a typist or punch them manually. Even simple typos and syntax errors don't come back for half an hour or more.

So yeah, a factor of five for a typical programmer sounds about right to me. Truly great hackers might get closer (because they aren't as limited by tool overhead), but a typical IT wonk would be utterly lost in that environment and do much worse.
The first place we checked was the radio. The first words we heard were "...if you are in the evacuation zone..." and thought oh-oh what evacuation zone is that? Full details didn't come soon enough so we went to the net: firefox search box "toronto evacuation zone", news results for, right-click a few links from recognized news sources (cbc,bbc,globeandmail)
There is a nice tool named www.competitious.com that may help you doing it.
You guys are so lucky. Here in DC, we have the second-highest ridership in the country, and somehow these nincompoops can't get the system to pay for itself. Never mind that we don't have month passes like in most normal cities, and that somebody who regularly rides the Metro will easily spend in excess of $200, even $300 per month. Thanks for hiking fares again, guys! And the number of cars, stations, and miles of track almost certainly pale in comparison to those in New York.

Hell, I pay $140/month to take the Orange line two stops west and a flat-fee bus to its second stop on the route. And people wonder why we have such awful traffic: Driving is often cheaper!
I don't agree that your concern applies. Twitter is an opt-in system so users that abuse their lists will die when people get annoyed and unsubscribe.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you @ message somebody even if they aren't following you? He is not referring to a general $$ tweet, but to an @ $$ tweet.
Gamers Get Ready For Intel’s I7 | TechJaws
Russian Hacker Gang at it Again | TechJaws
This is a great article, and it re-iterates something I've seen time and time again in website usability tests: People aren't stupid, they're just bad at expressing their desires. Generally a feature request has a good basis, but the proposed feature may not be the best solution.
Hadoop: When grownups do open source
Sure, but that's easy enough to solve if revenue is at stake.
Nine reasons the iPhone SDK and apps platform is lacking
"Best" is contextual. "Undo" is conceptually simple to a user. It is often a nightmare to put into and existing code base.
First off, let me say that I thought this presentation was cool as hell - a holistic view of security, showing all the various weaknesses, with cost/value. Very, very well done.

Having said that, I also have to say that there's an underlying attitude that often exists from folks showing off security loopholes that bugs me - "we're just showing all the ways in which this system sucks, so we're really the good guys." Right. And if I walk up to you on the street and stab you in the eye with my pen, I'm just showing you how vulnerable you are by not wearing body armor and a helmet with a face shield.
Ask YC: Those using PHP, what do you use for talking to your database (MySQL)?
Say, for example, you're working with MySQL. Are you using the mysql/mysqli_* functions, PDO's drivers, ADOdb, etc? Or perhaps an ORM like Doctrine or Propel? I'm just curious to see what others are using, as there are a lot of choices out there.
I think one key takeaway of this article is also that a comments form is not the same as doing user testing.
The story is the same as it was in the 90's. Most shops are culturally resistant to Unit Testing. Most management is too short sighted to appreciate the benefits. Unit test correctly, and you will still be in the world-beating minority.

It's no wonder that Python and Ruby have unit testing cultures. They don't have the measure of safety that static typing gives. To safely refactor in those languages, one really should be unit testing. As a result, many projects end up unit testing and come out ahead.
Why 'Nonprofit' Does NOT Mean 'Lose Money'
Anyone looking at this should also consider Telegraph (telegraph.rubyforge.org).
Well, 1$ per message is prohibitively expensive for most spamming operations I think...
Can't hurt to go in with a base of knowledge when talking to a lawyer.

There are plenty of people on HN who have had experience here and I think we're all smart enough to sort out the speculative responses from the responses that look like: "At my company (x43.com), we just went thru this and here is what I learned:"
need a dropbox please thanks
Computers are a good tool for modeling things and managing complexity. Good models will sometimes yield surprising and beneficial results. This is becoming a part of the common wisdom expressed in a variety of ways:

"Evolution is smarter than you."

"The street will find its own use for technology."

Someone should do a Wikipedia-like site based on the old Connections series on PBS. I think you could do a site like this based solely on the history of technology and its interconnections.
Las Vegas Real Estate & Home Loans
Many people in Las Vegas wish that they had enough savings to go in for a property especially when the property values have come down so drastically. No one expected this negative spell on the US real estate sector. One of the most affected allied sectors is the banking industry that was getting richer and richer with the booming real estate markets.
19 Ways To Speed Up Windows XP
typically through whichever active record type interface provided to me by the framework i'm using.
A good writeup about the learning process of getting involved with AI. The author just got into AI A modern Approach, which is a book I highly recommend. When I find free time, I tend to work through that books exercises for a good challenge.
Internet Provider RANT
Gentle Deployment
10 years to achieve true mastery? Sounds about right. I've also often said it takes 3 years to "get dangerous," in both senses. My data is from studying and teaching music.

On an even shorter time frame: once you get to the point that you're enjoying what you're doing, the only one who can stop you is yourself.
I don't know why they're very worried; they have central control over the fragmentation - unlike something distributed like open source
Sometimes it's a little showy and really more intended to harm than help, yeah.

In this case it's probably more like this:
Government is selling everyone body expensive armour that claims to protect your vitals against BIC pen stabbings, built by contractors who are buddies with those in power. A group of hackers walk around and take pictures of holes on people's armours. They also demonstrate stabbing a dummy wearing said expensive armour.
Unless you broaden your definition of spam. I believe I can be spammed by legitimate companies of which I am a customer. For instance, GoDaddy, Amazon, NewEgg, et al spam me all the time. It's not that I don't enjoy their products/services, but they are emailing me unsolicited advertisements (yes, I know I can opt out). This is the type of spamization I am referring to, not Nigerian scams, Viagra ads, and the like.

I don't think $1 / message is prohibitive for a GoDaddy or an Amazon.
heh... "Along with the data processing framework, Doug Cutting also included a fault tolerant, replicated, distributed file system with Hadoop just because fuck you"
Y Combinator Challenge #16 - A form of search that depends on design
Apple looper laptop: neverending Customer service calls
out of 3 apple laptops i've had, one fits this description
How to leave a program running after you log out
Thank you, that's useful.
The Capability Pattern - Future-Proof Your APIs
Amazing article, only because it called out so many types of people simultaneously.
given all this funding and laser focus on features/purpose

I think it would be a serious mistake -- one which this lame article encourages -- to assume that the failure of the OLPC project represents anything more than the failure of the OLPC project.

I'm no optimist about the state of Linux desktop usability, but OLPC was never focused on improving the Linux desktop. It doesn't even appear to have been focused on customers. The primary focus was on publicity and novelty.
> Members of its "Open Salon" user-generated content community can now "tip" one another with real-world money if they like what they see.

Considering that is a closed system so far, TipJoy need not worry.
How social networks can add a dimension to your travel: real people
When using plain PHP I just the mysqli functions. The project I am working on now is using Codeigniter, so I am using it's ORM.
It seems to me doing something in a closed system would be easier to get traction than something like tipjoy, but harder to move into the open web.
Exactly. Listen to user's problems, not their solutions.
Watch New Movies Online Free | TechJaws
And people complain about Zed Shaw's expletive-filled writing style? At least Zed has a sense of humor and blasts just about everything in sight. As for this article, let's see. Hero worship? Check. Ad hominem attacks? Check. Uninformed comments ("RubyForge? What... is that?")? Check.
Understanding map and reduce
Love the Work, Hate the Job
What reading Tufte won’t teach you: Interface design guidelines
It appears that the "central" control is not as centralized as one might think-- in other words, different teams appear to be working (and contributing to the framework) without full knowledge of what other teams are doing, at the risk of dissipating a coherent vision.
Blackberry captures 10.6% of US cell phone market
For me it depends entirely on the project. If it is a tiny little thing I'm going to be finished with in an hour I might use the mysql/mysqli functions. For larger projects I've used MDB2 until fairly recently. I've been playing around with ZF for the past few months though and have been using Zend_Db.
Guilloches
LEELA: Didn't you have ads in the twentieth century?
FRY: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio... and in magazines... and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. But not in dreams, no sirree.
Great reference. It's got tons of hard numbers about subjects that I generally only see unsupported assertions about.
The difficult choice
I thought this was notable for several reasons.

-This figure is for the entire cell phone market, not just the smartphone market.

-There has been a lot of hype around the iPhone around the blogosphere (HN being no exception), yet the real-world figures are more telling. Despite what many may think, the iPhone isn't and won't be a BB killer (and vice versa).

- The Blackberry is probably getting ignored by the HN/startup in favour of iPhone apps. If you're doing something with mobile development, you probably shouldn't ignore a platform with a bigger market share and a far more capable API.
well unlike open source MS can tell their teams to stop working ala Internet Explorer 6
Britain from Above: 24 Hour Britain
As Thomas Jefferson is reputed to have said:

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."
Unfortunately only available to UK ip addresses but contains some real pretty data-vis