skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of Jerry Pournelle's Monk's Cell that he uses for serious writing productivity.

http://www.pournelle.com/slowchange/myjob.html
If deflation is so dangerous I wonder why anyone buys consumer electronics which, despite currency inflation, continue to decline in price due to advances in technology. If we experienced the full effect of deflation, today's iPad would cost a much tinier percentage of yesterday's Apple II. Would that have stopped people from buying either? I doubt it.
The title should be changed to avoid editorializing.

(The article clearly states they don't have the 4th label yet, they're only speculating they will in time.)
This has reminded me of the great "kill or cure" site based on articles published by the Daily Mail (a shitty UK newspaper), http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/

On a less humerous note, as a child (around a decade ago) I wasn't allowed a mobile for a few years of wanting one for fear that it could cause cancer, specially when around a still-developing brain (mine). I suspect it will be a long time before anything is confirmed either way.
The 'pointless tasks' are the mining of the original coins. There are additional tasks for verifying the validity of the transactions of coins as well, but they take much less processing power.
Does the new "illegal hotels" law have any effect on AirBnB?

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/05/31/airbnb-takes-manhattan-wi...
Unusually good article. Author knows what he's talking about.
"It is a story of pure unadulterated hustle. And I love it." - Fred Wilson talking about the AirBNB team's Obama cereal hustle.

I'd like to borrow his words in regard to this post.

Fred's original post - http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html
The problem is that if you accept, say, some latin-1 data, stash it away in the database unknowingly, and later treat it as if it were a UTF-8 string, that is problem. (In some cases, it's actually a security problem because of the memory corruption that could result from treating latin-1 as utf8. But security aside, your app will display garbage because your database is garbage, and that's bad.)
>Is there really much of interest in press releases, or were they just a handy corpus you had around?

Actually, both. Corporate marketing departments spend a lot of effort crafting the proper press releases. Entire agencies exist to help companies with press releases. I think we make a great companion tool for professionals in that area. We have an example of how EffectCheck can help with press releases on our blog [1].

>On a tangent, how does your system interpret common HN words like "healthcare", "Obama" and "education", I wonder? Could you have an "intellectual" or "hacker-ish" dimension based on manual categorisation of words into "this is stuff HN should be talking about" vs "this is stuff that belongs on reddit"?

We certainly can do that, and we offer it as a service to clients that want hand-crafted, demographic-specific dictionaries (like political campaigns).

[1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/14/delivering-bad-news-a...
It's worth noting what those percentages mean. They report percentages that mean that 1-n% of couples who use it as their sole birth control method for a year get pregnant. So 98% doesn't mean you get pregnant 1/50 times.

98% still isn't great (if you think about it, it means you're fairly likely to have 1 unwanted pregnancy in your life if you always use a 98% effective method), but it's a lot better than how it sounds to people who don't know what those percentages mean.
It's true. Ask for what you want in this world, it will usually not be offered.

I've had to get over my own personal shyness to help promote and market our startup (http://infostripe.com) and at times it's been difficult to just ask for help, opinion and testers. But when I do it's always quite rewarding.

Ask, speak your mind, be reasonable and the things you want are obtainable.
MadeForHackers.com - Kick ass landing pages for kick ass hackers
Can you believe this guy? He switched from a model-m-clone keyboard to something that looks like logitech. Sacrilege!
C++ can be quite readable, but C can't be particularly magical. If I were Linus and I spent my days reviewing patches from all sorts of folks to a very large codebase, I'd be inclined to prefer a language that can't do anything unless you ask for it.
Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain
I'm not sure if "invading" is the right way to look at this
Conservative generation gap nonsense. The prevelance of Google Maps means people can't plan directions and hence can't read some graphs?

Ban television, radio, electric lights, the horseless carriage, automated looms, steam engines, the printing press, and writing while you're at it.

This sort of "the basics are really important" nonsense is sometimes heard from the old directed at the young because they can no longer argue against calculators themselves, so they make a proxy.
Many of the people I studied with had problems with "the" (I still use it wrong sometimes), so it probably depends on your native language (mine is Finnish).
"The search field covers the content of the site, if you were searching and a match was under the field, or you wanted to click a link/button under the search field, you’re out of luck."

or are you?

http://littlebigdetails.com/post/6000057345/chrome-if-a-resu...
That's an SGI keyboard on the desk, I couldn't plug it in to the laptop in the caravan but an adapter has been ordered and should be here tomorrow or so.
You're right, the "th* sound is the bane of non-native speakers (maybe an analogy would be the "ch" sound in German).

However, I was referring to the actual usage of the definite article, not its spelling. I think the problems here are of two different kinds:

Those who come from languages where there is no definite article (e.g. Chinese, Turkish) struggle to understand the correct usage. This is one of the most common glitches I hear from my Mandarin speaking colleagues (in addition to omitting plural forms).

Not all IE languages have articles, i.e. Hindi, Russian, Latin. Simplifying thing, one may say that English is a curious mixture (or bastard :-) of French and Anglo-Saxon, both of which has articles. It shed a lot of its grammatical rules over the centuries (e.g. noun declension, verb endings) but still carry vestiges, like the appendix, which is what confuses other IE speakers. These errors, tend to be the opposite of the Mandarin case, i.e. the over-regularization of the usage. My wife, who is near-native in French, does this frequently in her English usage.

This brings to mind a slightly different topic: The prediction of gender for (genderless) words adopted from English, i.e. if you are German and see the word iPad for the first time, which gender do you use? This study (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132...) tackled this problem for Scandinavian languages and found that it is quite difficult, they get ~70 accuracy.
Just Relax?
Cedar now allows you to scale any dyno as low or high as needed, including all the way down to 0. This means you could choose to scale your web dyno down to 0 and a worker to 1. If left this way for the entire month you would have 720 worker dyno-hours and 0 web dyno-hours total at the end of the month, fully inside the 750 available per month.
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/billing-changes

This means any process type, for example cron jobs, for free. As long as only one process is ran per app, but as far as I know, you can run as many apps as you want. This sounds like a very nice deal. Am I missing something?
Seconded: Glasgow also has some of the most amazing architecture, especially in the Park area [1].

I think a lot of the talk about the rough side of Glasgow has been overblown. Every city has rough areas and dodgy people. There are parts of London it's inadvisable to go out in after dark, in fact I've lived in some.

[1]:http://www.scotcities.com/westend/parkdistrict.htm
Deciding How to Decide: Taste-Matching Or Expert-Based?
I'm not sure that I understand. You have just demonstrated that the algorithm does not work.
I did originally have a similar idea, where I started out by looking at the top 10% of comments each month (ranked by upvotes). However, the resulting trends looked pretty similar to the overall community: http://blog.effectcheck.com/top_dep_hap.png
hmm.. for some reason it feels like a viral ad for that Hidden app.
To put it another way: being a good software developer requires the ability to internalize and traverse complex mental models entirely within your head, then convert them into a set of models and rules that implement that mental model for others to use. So as a group, developers are self-selecting for being very tolerant of a relatively complex UX relative to the median user.

I suspect you could find this in other fields - for example, I'd be that a commercial airlines pilot is pretty good at maintaining a complex mental model of his aircraft's systems in his head. But very few of those fields are asked to create products / experience for a set of users that does not have that same capacity to deal with abstract mental models.

Making that worse is the fact that at least in most physical systems, there are constraints on complexity and process, or established social scripts for a process. (E.g. most of us "know" how a restaurant works, and we all definitely know how the ordering process works.) Software doesn't have those constraints so you can get into trouble fast.
I love this. Being scrappy is one of the best qualities among entrepreneurs. The attitude of "do anything" to succeed usually results in success not to mention it is one of the characteristics that PG looks for in founders.
It is quite obvious that the article compares Chrome against Safari. This makes you objection to point 5 invalid, since Safari uses a search bar, not a search dialog and the thing you think is missing in the list of good points is something Safari has had forever.
Wow I never associated squeamishness with physicality/abstractness of the idea. It does seem to hold up!
It's got to be really frustrating, knowing where your laptop is but not being able to have the police get it.

Any lawyers want to chime in on whether the owner has a right to reclaim his property legally? May be if it is in plain sight in the public?
"I plan to remain hard-headed about this until I am convinced that abandoning the rote sorts of exercises done in, say, a linear algebra class (which can also be done on a calculator) does not hinder our ability to form intuition about how to do proofs, etc"

It is positive statements that require proof, not negative ones. If you believe that the introduction of calculators, google maps, etc., has negatively impacted number sense and human spacial reasoning, it is on you to prove it.
When someone says "Craigslist spam!", is the first you think of a) spam posted to craigslist as listings, or b) emails advertising something (surreptitiously) to people that have listed their property on craigslist?

Not that the latter isn't "spam" of a sort, but it doesn't feel quite like "craigslist spam".
2How  to Distinguish Yourself
I think it counts as "blackhat", but I'm not really outraged. To me, its equivalent to cruising the singles section of Craigslist and responding as a sock puppet recommending a particular dating site. Not a huge deal, but its not 100% above board either.
Blackhat or not, this is a great example of how there are very viable alternatives to SEO in terms of internet marketing. The ever changing rules and laws of search engines unfortunately make or break a vast majority of online businesses.
It's a good question, and I guess we'll see how well the correlation holds. It's worth noting that the stock market bottomed in March 2009, so this may be a lagging indicator.
ffmpeg is far more complex than wget, and has some seriously intimidating output for "--help", but it does the sensible thing of guessing intention from file extensions/suffixes. `ffmpeg foo.bar foo.quux` will just convert your file, silently.
I'm sure it's a big deal for you, but surely you understand that this is a feature that only 0.5% of the population cares about. Most people are happy to watch 4:3 television stretched to fit their wide screen TVs and you can't believe that Google hasn't implemented color profiles?
Webian Shell: A full screen web browser built on Chromeless
Wow, that's pretty cool.

"The tools also allow you to implement a guestbook or any other
form that needs to write information and display it to users
later in about 2 minutes. "

This line especially made me laugh even though I'm probably interpreting it wrong.
While looking at the Wikipedia entry for definite article, I found that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_%28grammar%29#Definite_...) that was derived from þæt, the neuter singular form of the in Middle English.

Fascinating stuff!
Here an algorithm, there an algorithm
I've seen a chiropractor and x-rays are a part of the procedure. You can't do medicine without seeing that there is a problem, correcting the problem, and then verifying that the problem is solved.
clever advertising if that's the case
The Thrill Electric - Victorian Internet Motion Comic
If I keep working, it keeps coming in... If I don't, it doesn't buy me very much time
Start Lots and Start Small
One thing to keep in mind is to disable sub-pixel rendering of fonts, or at least change the layout from RGB to VRGB. Otherwise, the fonts might have color outlines due to wrong assumptions about the sub-pixel layout made by the renderer.
What about trilingual or quadlingual people?
I wondered the same thing. Then I decided I didn't care, and bought it. If it's marketing, it's well done, and it looks like a useful app.
Epicurean Affair at the Palazzo, 2011.
Yeah, why would he publish the guy's face, but blur out his google account info? It smells like an ad to me as well.
solution for the deterioration- why cant we simply disable the ability for people to post who get X amount of "off topic" votes?
> Echoing back UTF-8 when you get UTF-8 input is handling binary, not handling text.

Nope. UTF-8 is text. We don't live in an ascii world anymore, text requires all 8 bits and a variable number of bytes per character.

> It won't work at all if you ever have any data sources or sinks that are not UTF-8

So don't do that. (Or convert as necessary.)

> and it won't work if you actually have to treat the data as text ("match all characters that are whitespace").

Wrong. Actually it works just fine.

> Yes, some PHP functions take binary blobs that contain UTF-8 octets and return correct-looking answers. That's all they do, though; that's handling UTF-8, not handling Unicode.

So? Since that's completely sufficient to do the job why do you want more?

> In Perl, characters are abstracted away from their character encoding.

Why? Why would I want to do that? Is this complexity for the sake of complexity?

> Your PHP method just assumes everything is UTF-8, which is simply not a safe assumption to make.

Yes, actually it is a safe assumption for the simple reason that the only types of strings I handle are UTF-8. In todays world there is no reason to use anything else. All other character sets are obsolete and should never be used.

And if you do need to handle one then convert as necessary, or define your app to handle only that character set. Programs that need to handle multiple character sets in the same applicate are extremely rare. There is no need for extreme complexity just to handle the rare case.

> Consider the case of binary data: if you start treating binary data like it's UTF-8 text, you break the binary data.

So don't do that.

> But change the locale to en_US.ISO-8859-1, and it doesn't work anymore.

So don't do that.
Sure, of course the best approach would be to optimize for one non-nexus function and then collaborate with others. For example, you probably don't need to know how to farm if you are a doctor. :-)

Major digression though.
Its definitely an ad. I've seen too much internet to believe the wording of that app pitch is genuine.

Also, I don't even think its possible to drive with a macbook on your knee like that.
That would be awesome marketing, but wouldn't that involve intentionally leaving a MacBook to get stolen somewhere in Oakland?
This page crashes the default browser on Android 2.2, every time.
This patent for "Ranking blog documents" seems to disagree:
http://bit.ly/msgrsv

"[0044] References to the blog document by other sources may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. For example, content of emails or chat transcripts can contain URLs of blog documents. Email or chat discussions that include references to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document."

Andriy Bihun, the first name on the patent, is still a Google software engineer according to LinkedIn.
Why did he blur out the guy's google username?
The reason this makes me (and others by the looks of it) suspicious that this is a well made ad for the app, is that if it shows where the macbook is, why not just go get it, i certainly would, with a couple of my larger friends.
Yes, you're right that STDs can still be spread with condom use, but with condoms the odds are better.
Seems to me it could be he doesn't want anyone emailing the guy and tipping him off that the owner knows who has it and that the app is tracking the laptop until it can be recovered.

Its unlikely that any of the guys friends read HN, but its not that unlikely that some idiot seeing the blog post would send some email to the guy that would alert him.
How do apache hosts prevent against attacks like this? Or, at least how do they harden their implementations against it?

I'm not much of a sysadmin but this intimidates me. I've always known that allowing PHP/.htaccess uploads are dangerous, if not fatal, and have done everything I know how to prevent them.
The height of irresponsibility here is women who claim to be on the pill because they actually want kids, but to afford that they have to "oops" some guy who doesn't. This, and paternity fraud, are what make male birth control important.
I reported the crime to the police and even told them where it was, but they can't help me due to lack of resources.

They must be too busy installing illegal exhaust systems on their police Harleys (http://motorcycles.about.com/b/2008/06/16/oakland-motorcycle...).

Sorry to be off-topic. As a former Oakland resident, it's the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Oakland PD. Seriously, though, if you can provide the exact location of your stolen property, how can the police not see tremendous value in following up on it?
I don't get it, what's the prank about?
If you steal it back, how would the original thief prove anything was taken?
If some guy had my MacBook, and I did this, I would generally include details like, I don't know, my name and contact email or phone number. You know, so the Mayor's office or Police Department PR people could reach out to me, or others might help me ("hey - that's Joe from Flat 3") retrieve it.

Unless, this guy had my MacBook in a viral ad campaign that is.

Edit: Here's the owner of the MacBook http://twitter.com/#!/jmk He seems real, but he does work for an agency that specialises in interactive ad campaigns.
Persistence is one of the major things PG looks for in founders, it is foolish to mock it as a things only beggars do.
Free Gmail Service Will Tell Your Contacts When You're Too Swamped To Respond
This is like the 5th time I've told you this:

So don't do that.

Don't accept some latin-1 data. Accept only UTF-8, and if you have to accept latin-1 you have two choices: Convert it to UTF-8, or use only latin-1.

> In some cases, it's actually a security problem because of the memory corruption that could result from treating latin-1 as utf8.

What are you talking about? There is no memory corruption. UTF-16 can have serious issues, but UTF-8 is quite resilient.
This is the guy's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/#!/jmk

I don't think it's a fake. He works for ExactTarget, an e-mail marketing services company.
I've been exploring the 4hww lifestyle business thing for a bit now, and it's always nice to read the other side of the argument. However, in this case I can't help but feel that anyone who's churning away at a blog or ebook that no-one cares about, has missed the core of the strategy. I'm pretty sure Monsieur Ferris himself says that you should test the market by getting cash commitment before embarking on a big project. I've not got the book to hand so correct me if i'm wrong, but i recall something about making experimental ebay auctions which you cancel at the last minute, and so forth. If you can't prove your market with real money, abandon that particular ship and find another. Regardless of how you plan to run a product-selling business, that seems like good sense to me. If you've poured hours into your ebook without checking to see that there are buyers at that price, you've dug your own grave.
When you said outsource, I thought you were using saved money to subsidize development.

How many months expenses do you have saved up? And can you monetize the idea? (if you don't mind sharing, what is the idea?)
Check out the results for their own webpage. Click "Try EffectCheck on this page!" here:

http://effectcheck.com/tour

I'm a little skeptical.

It rates "anxiety" as "medium-high." Yet I don't feel the slightest bit anxious reading that page. Nor does the author come off as anxious. It all feels very positive to me. (I'm counting the text alone, not the graphic design.)

It rates "compassion" as "very high." I wasn't able to find a description of what exactly the compassion measurement means in EffectCheck. But I'll go out on a limb and assume a high compassion rating means a text will either make you feel like the author is compassionate, or make you feel compassionate yourself. I don't feel either for that page. Not that it's hostile--I just don't feel anything on that axis when I read the page.

It's entirely possible that I've misunderstood how EffectCheck's ratings should be interpreted. It's also possible that I'm missing the point by comparing how I think I feel against EffectCheck's results. Maybe we're unreliable observers of how a text emotionally affects us, and EffectCheck more accurately predicts what's really going on deep in our brains. In which case, forgive my unwarranted naysaying.
A History of Vector Analysis [pdf]
I wish Hidden's site had more information. I don't want to pay until I can find out more - like, can I schedule how often the system takes screenshots and photos with the camera? Will it store screenshots and try to do a bulk upload if the laptop isn't online at the time of screenshot? Does it run even if nobody is logged in? etc., etc.
Seems that this is the guy whose laptop was stolen: http://unraveled.com/

Nothing about him working for whoever makes the Hidden app, though it's hard to find info about exactly who makes that app on their web page. I still can't tell if it's legit.

EDIT: He works for ExactTarget (http://www.exacttarget.com/) which is a marketing firm that does social media stuff among other things. Seems pretty likely to be an ad for the app. Or a huge coincidence.
Good to see Henry Kissinger on HN! :)
İnternetten Para Kazanmak:Zenginlik Zamanı Eğitim Seti
Since Questions getting answerd. Whats your Clojure Stack?
On Design, Soccer, and Mentorship
For a free and open-source alternative to Hidden, try: http://preyproject.com/

It supports all the major OS's, including phones.