skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now, whenever I speak with certainty & confidence, it feels like I'm faking it.

I have felt the same way. It's very hard to fight away that feeling, but I can see the trance people go into when I cut away the "truthful", disclaimer-ed, somewhat more equivocal and/or safe speech, and start talking like an expert, like I believe I'm an expert even if I don't believe it - I see people fall into a trance and I'm selling them. That's what you have to do, but it can definitely feel.. weird. Fake or whatever word you want to use.
There are a few things I don't understand. It seems that a lot of websites are tracking behavior at toolness.org. Why? Is it reversed, i.e., the add-on from toolness.org is tracking these websites, or do these sites have sort of counter-measures to see when people use privacy tools? Can they actually read in information from non-https sites? Also, twitter seems to be tracking behavior on a number of sites. Is it because of those small twitter widgets everyone uses on these sites, or is twitter actually trying to collect data on what I like to browse?
More Relevance, Less Clutter (and other updates)
Now here's a company that's solving a real problem. Great going guys.
Personally I disagree. Maybe as options, but not by default. The bar looks nice because of its simplicity.

Adding a bunch of addon attachments would ruin the unobtrusive functional aesthetic that i think that google is going for.
This looks pretty awesome. I remember when I was thinking about making a quote Website back in college. I had just learned about the Levenshtein distance algorithm in a class and was exciting about finding a real-life (re: non-contrived) scenario to apply it to.

Anyway, this looks like a really useful library. Glad it's freely available.
I'm still amazed Myspace gets that much traffic. I have no idea why anyone visits that site. Are their music offerings enough to keep driving traffic?
What's more interesting to me about this graph is that for all the supposed dominance of Twitter, it's actually still less influential than MySpace if this graph is accurate.
An option to select from 2 settings would be better , like Gmail's new themes - dense/regular , although dense is still too spaced when compared to the default theme at the moment .
I sympathise with your first sentence and mostly agree with it. The second is wrong, even if you don't understand it as it was meant, as government employee unions.
Interesting comments on the US Debt Ceiling
The fault doesn't fall 100% on the athlete. Bad loans, high risk loans, were given to these people just like the rest of America but on a much larger scale. Yes I agree they spend lavishly, but all of them have over financed themselves!
I really love Amazon and the Kindle but is THIS the future?

I too had to type things from my kindle to send quotes to friends. Though, never that long. Thanks for the effort!
This is in The Netherlands, not sure if they have the same plans on switching it off.
On iPhones, iPads & a Little Bit of Mordor | MacOS KenDensed | The Mac Observer
Thanks!

The challenge that we have is to find a way to reach these scientists. They rarely, if ever, read techcrunch or hacker news and the standard publications in that space have a long publication cycle.

Ideas to reach out to life-science researchers welcome! One guerilla thing we did last week was to get coffee sleeves with "Quartzy, Caffeine for you Lab". We went to the coffee shop near the research buildings at Stanford and put in these sleeves next to the milk and sugar!:)
Sometimes, to get what you love you need to sacrifice something else that you love, too. To be able to stay with my sweetheart (I'm still with), 15 years ago I had to quit my activity as a musician, arranger and artist to get a job bringing enough money to live with.
Your job is only one part of your life; if your life is balanced enough, nothing more than 25 or 30% of it.
I've been waiting for them to make more official announcements to this effect, and more details - there's been more than enough info to imply this is their goal for quite a while now. And I feel I must say: WANT. If this succeeds, it'll be a game-changer in almost every way.
ICal: Viewing All of a Day’s Events | TMO Quick Tip | The Mac Observer
I completely agree, James. Certainly that this what makes the project so difficult. Perhaps one could remove all but the most essential features, present them in a simple and well-desinged manor, and sell the service as an educational / first-time investing platform
Apple Files for Gesture-Based Data Transfer Patent
RRDtool is pretty nice, but it has a fair number of scalability issues too:

* Once you create an RRA (archive file) you can't modify it to add or remove metrics, or change their properties. This makes them relatively inflexible.

* Updating RRAs is I/O heavy. Every time an update comes in, the OS must read, modify and write a page.

* RRDcache mitigates this somewhat by deferring flushes, but there are diminishing returns to this (eventually the number of writes coming in will cause the cache flush and filesystem metadata update rate to exceed the maximum IOPS available), and you risk data loss in the event of a power outage or the OOM killer kills the process.

Time-series data access patterns tend to be write-heavy. Storing first in an append-only log is a big win here; Cassandra and MySQL are both good choices, though you do have to think about the schemata first. And disk is so cheap now that expiration can be an afterthought.
I read this and thought of you.

I think you've said you bought PR for Viaweb. Any guidelines you can share? In short, what can founders do to best shape how they're covered?
Apple Serves GetJar with “App Store” C&D
Very interesting post.
So if the shop page is the most important referrer to the purchased item, and the search result page is the most important referrer of new visitors to shop pages, it means that buyers take good note of the shops they like when making a purchase. So the importance of good product presentation on listings (picture and description) is bigger than selling that specific item. Sellers should think that every single product they list is a piece of advertising for the whole store.
Thanks for sharing!
I'd love to see that happen, but we have been predicting the demise of Windows since the last century but Windows is still going strong. Inertia is a powerful thing.
Some people will play to lose.
But if you could travel faster than the speed of light, you could send a mirror to the edge of the universe to figure out what happened in the past.

Figure out what happened to the tops of everyone's heads when they were outside, that is...
Not thread safe.
So, GSD is just "grep -r static . | grep -v class" then?
The idea they're selling is that you need a new watch. It's something a major watch maker can push through a savvy PR firm especially to counter declining sales.
Twenty-two amazing Apple rumors. Some of them must be right.
Infographic: How Mobile Payments Are Changing the World
I would start by contacting major Universities in my area, or in the country, that are known for their life-science programs. Many scientists who graduate stay and work for a few years at their U, so it may be a good place to start. You may even consider talking to the professors directly.

Also, maybe ask around and join their groups, forums, discussions, or any place you can go to reach your target market.
Actually I think singleton is the default: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-fram...

I didn't know about the other scopes though
Hiten Shah’s Advice to Non-Techies: ‘Get Dangerous’
I've got to agree that the pricing is too high. The free plan is useless to me, because 50 signups is basically planning for failure, to me.
Also check out CouchSurfing.org and AirBnb
Verbling (YC) Links Up Language Learners With Native Speakers
"Money is also the convenient method of keeping score for optimizing businesses, which feels like a game to me. I really enjoy winning games with complicated rules sets, especially by optimizing the heck out of play, because optimization is often as much fun as actually playing the game."

It reminds me a very inspiring talk by Seth Priebatsch called "A game layer on top of the world". I was at SXSW 2011, you can listen to it here: http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000325
Very interesting! The real challenge for Jayant and Adam will be getting their tendrils deep into existing sales processes in labs.

It's a sector that's prime for disruption - much like Octopart before them, these guys are primed to disrupt a messy space. Looking forward to recommending it to the local labs.
It wasn't a sentence, it was a qualified clause: "To be clear, aside from the rare exceptions we identify in our Privacy Policy, no matter how the Services change, we won’t share your content with others, including law enforcement, for any purpose unless you direct us to."
The nature of the youtube problem isn't technical. Any hacker can figure out how to download a youtube video. The problem is policy. You will get thwarted, shutdown or sued.

You can't build a business on top of subverting youtubes TOS. It won't work.
More timeless advice is to love what you do.
REX is most useful is when you're focusing on lexical details of a document -- for example, when transforming one kind of text document (e.g., plain text, XML, SGML, HTML) into another, where the document may not be valid, well formed, or even parsable for most of the transformation. It lets you target islands of markup anywhere within a document without disturbing the rest of the document.
I moved to SF from NYC 2 months ago. I constantly checked the "rooms/shared" and "sublet/temp" sections on craiglist and sent numerous emails/calls.

I would recommend just finding anything you can, in your price range and in a central location for the time being. You are going to have a hard time doing this remotely, so find a cheap hotel/hostel.

Don't plan on working too much when you first get here, you should be spending any time you can looking at apts. and locking one down.

I was looking for something very specific (location) and eventually found it. The whole process took a few weeks, 2 remotely looking and 1 in SF.
If proving the positive assertion implies the negative assertion, what's the difference?
Custom Die Cut Stickers – The Juicy Stickers
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Scaling issues to keep in mind while developing a social network feed
Ask HN: I am a non-tech founder, outsourced coding. Any accelerators accept me?
I can remember the pain of doing this as a first year intern at a sporting odds aggregation site, the biggest challenge was dealing with the invalid xml and non standardized naming scheme. Montreal Canadians, The Habs, etc.

Our eventual solution was to use a trained matcher, but obviously it was not ideal since human intervention was required :(
This is a privileged worldview. People growing up in other circumstances often have to A) find a way to be happy while doing mind-numbingly shitty and possibly dangerous work just to get by or B) be content not to be happy.

It's worth considering how much first-world suffering is caused by the belief that we somehow deserve to be "happy".
It's colloquial in the same sense that it's ok to say "the best man for the job"

"We were looking for the best for the job" .... and then go on to announce it's a woman. We don't have to be such prudes to be respectful of the other gender.
Paypal hits 100m accounts, predicts end of wallet by 2015
Enum version:

public enum Singleton {
INSTANCE;
}

Guaranteed against multiple instantiation.

Edit: the class version of the singleton example should also be made final, or I could just extend your class and therefore bypass your singleton restriction.
There's a corollary too, which the University failed to study (but should've)...which is that if you treat people like infants and feed them fox news garbage 24/7, they act like idiots and society collapses. Go figure.
Some data points:

1) I'm a 6'3" brown guy. I never get heckled when I walk down the street. I'm reasonably handsome, but in general, I don't have the sense that a lot of women are checking me out as I go about my daily business.

I was surprised to learn that my wife would get catcalls when she wasn't with me in our old somewhat sketchy neighbourhood. It never happened when she was with me, so I was like "WTF, people actually do that?"

2) At a previous job, I had a long walk to the coffee shop in suburbia. One time I was walking about 20 m behind a couple of women. I found one very attractive. I noticed that almost without exception, guys driving in oncoming traffic would crane their necks to look at her. I sometimes do this too, so I'm not suggesting that this is wrong per se, but it is very noticeable.

Imagine you're just stepping out to run some errands. Almost every guy you see checks you out. I'm not going to argue about whether this is right or wrong. I'm just pointing out that many women's experiences are very different from men's. It's a weird vibe when you can't go anywhere without being obviously on display.

3) Tall people get paid more than short people. Many short people I know are very aggressive, as though they've become accustomed to defending their turf. I'm taller than almost everyone I meet, so when I'm in an elevator with someone taller, it feels wrong. Subconsciously I'm thinking about how I'd win a fight with them. You could argue that this is just weird and neurotic, but my wife says the same thing. She knows how to incapacitate a man, but again there's just this back-of-the-mind threat assessment that's overlaid on everyday situations.

4) Sexually, mechanically, it's less threatening to probe things with your appendage than to let something into an orifice. In a non-sexual context, you'd poke a lot of stuff that you wouldn't eat. In many cultures male-male anal sex isn't considered gay for the top. Only the bottom is gay. So there's probably something biological going on here.

So to all those arguing about probability of violent sexual assault, etc. You're missing the point. It's a completely different vibe, and you won't be able to speak intelligently about gender and social issues until you understand that.
The HP Xpander
Using stories is a great idea, but I'm not sure how doable it is to generate images that suggest a story (certainly, harder than cute variations on robots); in addition, those stories have to be memorable i.e. make sense, as stories. I think that's approaching a hard problem, maybe even hard AI.

But I like the idea. Perhaps the image problem could be met by combining it with a bio (giving a story); and the "make sense" problem could be addressed by a story grammar (following the hero's myth as a template, with recursive and optional parts), written using templates consisting of canned pseudo-english sentences with gaps filled by a set of names, objects, places that play the various roles in the "hero grammar": the key, the sword, the grail, the shadow, the mentor, the ordinary world, the special word, various thresholds - perhaps some word generation for place names. If the story made sense, as a journey, it might be memorable, even stirring in an awkward way, despite all the grammar/template/presets...

Of course, maybe I'm wrong: "<color> <warriortype> with <injury>" is already fairly rich. Even, extending it to incongruous occupations (surgeon, nurse, motorcyclist, developer). Perhaps, like theatresports, just starting points of a place, occupation and problem is enough to suggest a story to the user?
Driving (well, racing) is a member of a set of things very few people get to do successfully as a career. The things that make racing exciting are typically the speed, the thrill, the danger, and how quickly everything happens.

In short, the only way to get these things in a job is in a professional sport, or maybe in the armed forces. Professional sporting is always an elite group, and fighter pilot's seats, the SEALS, and the Delta Force are similarly eclectic.
Ask HN: Please help me get out of this infinite loop of n00bness
I've been programming for just over a year now and I don't feel like I've learned nearly as much as I should have. Not only that, I feel like I'm not making any progress either. I feel like I'm stuck in an infinite loop of n00bness.

I haven't work on anything that I would really consider a “project” yet, which I'm sure isn't a good thing at all. I just don't have any ideas for projects.

What can I do to become a better programmer? I'm sure that I want to develop software for a living, but I feel like I'm not on the right part at the moment.
You want grad student mailing lists. Lab managers are often the unhappiest and lowest-ranked (or longest-lived) grad students. They'll love what you do. A simple email to their listserve and they'll use you right away.

Sweeten the announcement of your service with something like a "messiest lab cabinet" contest for lab students to photograph their lab cabinet and send it in. The winners get something free, and you get tons of publicity for the product.

Last: advertise on phdcomics.com. If there's one forum that reaches every single graduate student in the country, it's PhD Comics.
Getting a place like that last-minute in SF is going to be very difficult. It's difficult enough finding apartments in SF even if you plan ahead.

+1 to CouchSurfing and AirBnB. Just keep an eye on Craigslist.

If you don't work in the city proper, consider living outside of the city. Emeryvill and Berkeley are good bets. Be weary of Oakland as some parts are sketchy and unsafe. South Bay has several cities too but that may end up being pricey.
I think that anyone who comes from lower to middle class backgrounds and makes a substantial amount of money quickly faces the risk of losing it. Lottery winners, people who receive large court judgments, and pro athletes have consistently shown that as with most things, large amounts of money can be easy come, easy go.BTW: The NBA player turning down a $30Million contract and then going broke is quite funny to me.
EDIT> I feel different when I'm in a good neighbourhood versus a bad one. In a bad neighbourhood, I'm on guard -- my spidey-sense is tingling.

Now imagine that for roughly half the population it feels that way even in good neighbourhoods. How does it feel to always be on guard?
What's the problem? It's a photo taken in a public space. It's not like the government doesn't do the same thing to everybody 20-40 times a day (and more like 400 times a day in the UK). It's not like the guy went around breaking down people's doors because he thought he heard them flushing drugs down a toilet*.
Actually what I'd expect from Microsoft is to delay launching the new thing for several years in order to integrate it with various other services, re-branding it to windows/live/.net XXX, and wondering why the world has moved on in the meantime
"The Darknet Plan" Subreddit dedicated to creating a decentralized VPN
Never thought about it that way but it does start with a cross and my first name, kinda fits the nickname.
I'm worried we'll lose the look and feel of the old themes once the new Gmail interface is rolled out. I dislike the Big Blue Button that is showing up in all of Google's UI refreshes too. Google's search results seem very cluttered as well.
I observed something similar with dyslexia. A friend of mine is dyslexic. However he was only told that he was dyslexic a few months ago. Before he was told, he could read fine, and was quite good maths. Almost immediately after he was diagnosed, he started stumbling over words, and skipping sentences; he also dropped down to the 2nd last maths class from the 2 highest.

It's v. unscientific I know but it's an interesting observation all the same.
WebCL Brings Parallelism to the Browser
phpMyAdmin has multiple and severe security holes
Awesome job Dr. J!
Visual depiction of film characters ruled to be coved by copyright
You are going to hear this anytime this question is asked.

A: "Build Something!"

Reading books and following tutorials are all well and good, but you are not going to fully understand what it takes to be a professional developers until you start creating full applications.

Don't worry about the design, or perfect architecture, just come up with a small idea and build it.
Why I am a Bad Correspondent (by Neal Stephenson)
The only problem is that university professors are just hard to sell to. If they can solve that problem, its a product with huge value.
Hmm... Doing the math.. Nope, would still be too expensive :-/
Http://ewandoo.com/apple-wants-to-block-samsung-products-from-america/
Nonsense. The Albini article covers a lot less ground and has far fewer ideas. In particular it says nothing about alternative distribution models or the internet.
I don't have any ideas and anything I see when I search for ideas just seems silly.
If you are a student, I would join the Google Summer of Code. You can actually get paid while learning something. You could also look for Open Source projects that need a maintainer. Or grab one of the lists of startup ideas and try to implement one. Yet another solution would be to try to implement a web server or a framework just for fun.

You are right in that you need to work on projects to become a better programmer: that is the fastest way to learn. There are a ton of problems out there that need solving. You just need to find ones that interest you.
Hacker News RSS feed is broken
Doesn't seem to work for My Yahoo! I have even tried it in Safari and doesn't work there either
I don't think brokerage sites are not accessible, let me disagree on that one. Players like Charles Schwab, Ameritrade and eTrade made it very simple for common people to trade online, and there are millons of individual small traders already. Also, old boards like Motley Fool helped a lot of people understand how the sistem works and encourage them to take control of their investments.
Financial products like ETFs and interfaces like Yahoo finance and Google finance are visited by millions every month.
What is a REAL NIGHTMARE (at least for me, a foreigner) is the paperwork related to opening an account (banking or brokerage, the same). If you can think of a way (or service) to simplify that process, you would be improving people's life.
>may I tell them to "Stop or I'll shoot?"

Yes. Why not?

They then have the power to avoid all harm (in both directions), they can even stop and tell you how their family is starving, etc., so you can give them a bag of food and they can return your laptop.

Moreover if they pulled a weapon on you in return I think you'd be warranted in killing them.

>I don't want people doing things like that in Toronto

You want to protect thieves so that they can continue to steal without any risk?
It's measuring unique visitors to the domain.
If you like, you can run your own: https://github.com/jackdanger/hacker_news
What are some other mobile game developers in Toronto?
Anyone else not fully convinced by Comscore's numbers or traffic data from any other site like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, etc?

These are estimates until they actually have tracking pixels on the sites they measure.

I do think LinkedIn is making considersable progress and would like to see sites like Monster and CareerBuilder (relics of the dot com era) put to rest.
Well, technically it says, "have NOT been" as opposed to "are not going to be". Doesn't mean they aren't "talking" about a potential acquisition.

But, a status post like that does lead one to believe they are neither talking about, nor have been acquired.

Or, maybe they're just trying some reverse psychology, who really knows other than the parties involved! ;)
Agreed. Though we do sometimes write $5M, which is functionally equivalent. I've noticed in internet communication, it's common to say a numeral before the dollar sign. For example, "You're going to end up spending 100$ on that".