skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The European Browser Choice screen was a good example of where this style of sorting can come and bite you - the browser choice screen was designed to display a selection of browsers in random order, but the above sorting code unintentionally biased it towards particular browsers.

Here's a good writeup with a bunch of test runs and graphs:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/02/microsoft-random-browser...
An algorithm to selectively hide friends' posts on social networking sites
Two for four: `Javascript` and `Haskell` gave me sensible (I'd say great) recommendations, `Erlang` and `Neural Networks` were duds though.

Overall, the site looks great and certainly seems to function well, outside of my two obscure queries. Congratulations on a project well done!
Ask HN: Have you seen any cool / innovative uses of git and/or github?
I'm doing a presentation on Monday about git and github. I wanted to finish with a roundup of interesting uses for both.

One example would be that I saw someone using Github as their blog.

Any others?
“Hair Glasses”: Eyeglasses Made Of Human Hair
I always thought this was cheating a bit -- it's just an extra-large PPG (powered paraglider) with a dune buggy attached instead of a trike. When I hear "flying car", I usually think of some type of fixed-wing aircraft.
Good observation. Ironically there is an xkcd comic about this, too.

http://xkcd.com/903/

Frankly, I probably have to watch out myself to not fall into this trap. I'm not a CS major either and yes, its true I can probably bullshit for 5 minutes on many topics that I read about here or learned from friends.
Seven Cold, Hard Truths about Social Networking
So far, I haven't heard a PEEP from anyone paying backtype. If what you say is true, where is all the press about how horrible this is for their customers?
There is no shortage of work for people with low skill levels. There are simply structural impediments to employing people in low skill jobs.

One of the biggest impediments is competition from government benefits. To induce a person to work, an employer needs to offer them enough to compete with their next best alternative. At low wage levels (i.e., low skill labor), this is extremely difficult. Consumption as a function of earned income is actually flat up to about $20k/year.

Thus, it is economically rational for low skilled individuals to choose not to work, even if others are willing to pay for their labor.

http://crazybear.posterous.com/why-the-poor-dont-work
It's nice to know there are more of us spongers out there, some of us don't have a blog though suspicious look
I kind of branded it a bit "douchey" at first too but then as I thought about it, it seemed remarkably restrained considering he debugged this issue. It's not like this happened all the time, had to get kind of lucky and build and calibrate a system just right to capture it.

I don't intend this to be an inflammatory question, I'm sort of a perpetual ruby novice, it's never been my day job and I've never managed to sort of catch up with the community, as soon as I feel pretty good with something I find it's been obsoleted a couple times. I like it but how does the community at large deal with stuff like this? This guy found a real bug and invested some time in it, do other rubyists just deal with crashes and restart their stuff? Do they just consider it part of "being on the cutting edge?" Or do they not even notice?
The smugness just oozes through the page. These kinds of chickenshit tactics are the desperate moves of a stagnant company. The happiest development of my career has been watching the industry emerge from under the shadow of the software mafiosos at Redmond. If the U.S. patent system isn't reformed soon the baton of innovation will pass to other countries that don't enable these extortion schemes.
Cool concept. Why the email verification?

Also, maybe this is a common issue for email heavy / notification apps, but I almost wish there was something else to do after signing up. Can't think of anything useful though, just feels like there's an opportunity for more somewhere there.
I did this with Reddit years ago when much of the front page was programming/computer-related. I realized it was an awesome subject, spent a lot of time trying to figure out what they were talking about, and eventually changed my major to software engineering.
"By definition, almost all copyright infringement and trademark violation is transnational."

By definition? By definition!?

If that's the case, then as long as the bulk of pirates are in the same country as the copyright owner, then by definition, no violation has occurred.
Unfortunately, they left out part two of the TOS episode "The Menagerie." And I think I spotted a misspelling or two in the titles. Of all the titles to get wrong, this is a big one.
I hope this site wont become reddit ;-)
The issue is that the communities are open and when it reaches a critical point, it all becomes like reddit/slashdot/whatnot as it will follow the majority of people's interest.

So let's hope, this site doesn't grow too much ;-)
It's interesting how that story is colored differently, depending on whether one considers NeXT (and/or its perfectionist attitude) to be a spectacular success.
This is without a doubt the best post I've seen on Hacker News in months.
I've been experiencing this problem for over a week now.
How to Get Freelance Work While Still in School
Freelancing is becoming more and more popular as a way for students to earn money on the side. If you are actually hoping to go into a career in design, freelancing can also provide a leg up to help you get either better paying gigs after graduation or a full-time gig.
If Facebook was trying to launch an integrated search engine or a GMail competitor, then I would absolutely agree with you - those products would be inherently limited by the requirement that they tie into and feed back towards Facebook's core platform, but that isn't the case here.

I see where you are coming from. However, given the potential overhead of running a social network, plus the revenue that might come with it, do you think that Google's priorities might evolve, -that they might morph into a social network, taking their other products with it?
StackOverflow precedes Coding Horror, of course.

I assume you meant Coding Horror precedes StackOverflow.
This deal has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with how difficult it is to sell into higher education.
Just be careful with short-term thinking.
Jason Fried: How to get creative
ComScore: Apple Passes RIM in Handsets, Smartphones
Indeed. A problem could be once knowledge becomes commoditized there won't be much left to walk the gap between middle class and upper class.
Do you really know that or are your just guessing?
Be an evasive ninja in Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief | TiPb
Well... that is the difference between PR and practicality. PR says "can" like they do it every day.

While they could run prototype boards down the line, it is not quite as easy as the video makes it sound and it is unlikely they would do that lightly.

To run a prototype board down the line they would have to:

* Get the prototype PCBs fabricated (in 1990, this took a lot more time than today where you can get a multi-layer board fabbed in days). Note also that the NeXT boards were probably a lot more than 4 layers, which adds time and expense, especially 20 years ago. The good news is all the other items probably would take less time to complete than the PCB fab, so this would be the pacing item for the schedule.

* Get a new soldermask made to match the board.

* Procure the necessary non-production parts. With luck, can get small quantities (or samples) quickly from distributors.

* Reprogram the pick-n-place machines to put the parts in the right places.

* Load the pick-n-place machines with the right (new non-production) parts.

* Possibly have to tune the soldering ovens to get the temperature/time profile right (should be OK for small part changes).

Once everything is in-house and programmed, you can simply queue it and it is done.
And last I checked Intel, Dell, HP et al still counted as electronics.
The accuracy of these predictions is remarkable, from the anticipation of shifts in social interaction to the fragmentation of the two party system.

On this last point, is there any documentation of the role of the Internet in the development of the tea party movement?
My friend has shared their contact information on Facebook, I decide to contact them using my iPhone, and save their contact information. That now gets sync'ed from my phone to my Mac, which is sync'ed with Google because I use gmail for my main email account and I like to have all of my contact information also available from within gmail and more importantly google voice so that I know when people send me text messages and when they call me.

If my friends have trusted me with their information they also trust me to make sure to keep it safe. What service I use to store my data should not be of any consequence for them. That is the same way with this Facebook exporter (BTW, the iPhone app allows one to sync contacts from Facebook to the iPhone address book, which can then get sync'ed to .Mac, Me, or the new iCloud, from there back to a Mac and then back up to Google), it allows the user to get the data from Facebook and store it in their address book. Instead of having to go through each entry one by one this plugin automates the process.

I don't see how my friends that clearly have made this data available to me (so I could contact them) should now have a say as to how and where I store said data. Just because I decide to store it in my address book on Google doesn't make much if a difference, if they didn't want me to have that data in the first place they should have A. never have given it to me, or B. ask me to please remove their information.
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How To Save More Money Using Mint.com
I personally have a strong dislike for the Ubuntu-style notifications that can't be dismissed by clicking a close button, which Pines appears to use. My position is this: this is my desktop, if I want the notification closed, let me close the notification!

Now, with that rant out of the way, thanks for the link to another useful web notification tool.
Or you could create restful APIs simply with django-piston, django-tastypie or (my new personal favorite) django-dagny.
I think this is why I love listening to Build and Analyze by Marco - http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze
How RIM can survive…
Microsoft is now earning more money from Android than Google.

true story.
ITA's Matrix beta site (http://matrix.itasoftware.com) does both flexible day and flexible airport for multi-leg trips. To do multiple airports, type in the airport codes separated by commas: "lax,sfo".
hnslide has 2010/10/15 - current, with a couple hundred missing
what you saw was probably github pages, it's not really innovative, it's actually built into the site
I think it turned out pretty well for NeXT. They are the third largest company in the world by market cap, now.
And even when you understand a lot about these technologies -- it can be a great reminder of things to dabble in and see if they fit your model of how you work. This week I jumped into using Less (a CSS tech like Sass) after noticing a post on it.

How happy I am -- Less (or a similar tech) is now going to be a permanent fixture in my webdev world!
Hey, fexl. I'm the author of the post. Thanks for the comment. Yeah, your comments reminds me of one of my Humanities Professors' assertions --that Western Philosophy for the past 500 years has been a dialogue and refinement of the definition of freedom.
They are not only paid to express opinions, but to credibly do it. When they throw their credibility out the window by accepting money to express anything, they cease to be effective in supporting gay and lesbian interests.
at some point, we will need to acknowledge that there is simply not enough work to keep everybody gainfully employed 40+ hours a week.

Seems unlikely. We've been eliminating jobs with labor-saving devices for centuries. In the past they've always created as many jobs as they destroyed. What are the odds that this moment is the point when that finally stops happening?
Any feedback appreciated. If you'd rather get in touch directly - you can message me at omar@mendelapp.com. Thanks!
I almost forgot how DOOM, although primarily a DOS game, was created on NeXT systems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_of_Doom#Building_the_gam...
Investment company buyouts of entrenched education infrastructure are all about cash. The investment firm will cut any product development budget, raise prices, cut customer service, and eventually drive all the customers away. In the meantime, too many university administrations will waffle over the pain of moving to another platform for about 5 years. See how Oracle is abusing all the Sun education customers it inherited.
Their hardware was a resounding flop and building a state-of-the-art production facility for something for which there was no demand is in retrospect clearly a mistake.

Also, given that NeXT was bought for about 15% of Apple's market cap (after laying off most of their employees), it's disingenuous to imply that Apple == NeXT. What saved Apple was the iPod, not OS X and Cocoa.
Two years ago, when I started reading HN, I was a php programmer who didn't even know what functional programming was.

Now most of my personal projects are written in my new favorite language, Erlang. Sponge learning is awesome, specially when you supplement it with lots of hard work. Thanks HN.
Good is the enemy of great.

- Jim Collins

http://startupquote.com/post/7284306657
Totally agree - I'm a complete newbie when it comes to tech but I am learning at a fast clip because of HN :)
Further line saving: The << methods >> dictionary isn't needed, it's just mapping lower case strings to upper. Replace:

return methods[request.method](request, item_id)

with:

return request.method.lower(request, item_id)
> I proposed to start with a “quick and dirty” OS that would eventually be thrown away.

DOS is a great example of Worse is Better
Looking into diving into Django as well -- what Django book are you referring to, if I may ask?
There is no good way for Google to provide encryption within its gmail product without having the user provide the key to the browser/javascript (easily stolen) and or having the key stored on their servers (ease of use).

The unfortunate side effect of encryption is that it is not transparent, it requires users to be completely aware of what is and isn't encrypted and also to be completely aware of where their keys are stored and how they are treated. Defaulting to encryption would just make it so that the majority of the people are unable to communicate and or use the internet at large.

Most people do not use gmail with IMAP so suggesting client side is not going to really work. With encryption stuff like mailing lists will not work either, because you'd need to individually encrypt the message for each and every single recipient on the mailing list.
Ask HN: What's the ideal platform for online discussion?
There's a lot of online communities made for sharing links: MetaFilter, Reddit, HN, Slashdot, and many others. There aren't so many that exist solely for discussing topics -- discussing an issue, rather than commenting on a link about the issue. (Link-based sites often don't have the same depth of back-and-forth discussion, but rather many comments on the article's contents with unrelated points.)

I think this is partly because most discussion forum software is cumbersome and poorly designed, and partly because nobody has built the right community.

If you could build a discussion system from scratch, how would you do it? What would the software look like? The rules? The community?

My current thoughts involve a threaded system that's either invitation-only or has a high bar for membership, although I find current threaded discussion systems unsatisfactory.
Apparently some people don't realize that it was a bunch of (now) old guys that developed the technology that the internet was built upon. Then again, maybe a group of Google new hires can find it in their hearts to sit down and explain this internet stuff to Vint Cerf. After all, he's almost 70 and clearly wouldn't understand it.
Are you really going to criticize someone for acknowledging that they're new and have stuff to learn?
I suspect that China does not want to censor or influence Facebook, but rather to co-opt its IP, as it has done with other US corporations (sometimes legally, sometimes not) - see Cisco, Google, GM, Microsoft.

Holding a good-sized stake in FB is a great way to plant an inside man and gain access to that IP.
There are some notable open source EMS' (educational management system) like moodle.org.
Things About Google+
Well, maybe for starters: what is it? :-) "Stores any data" is kind of vague, as is the mention of analytics.
Yes, but MathOverflow is a website for research mathematicians. Studying mathematics after college is what most of the people on that website get paid to do.
Is there any reason why Microsoft isn't going after Google? I recall reading somewhere that it's because Google isn't actually producing the phone. Can anyone confirm this, or is just cowardice?
Kent Beck talks about accelerating software delivery (video)
You posted this last night. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728604) Please don't double-post. It's annoying, and it certainly doesn't look good on you either.
CDs are polycarbonate and shatter sharp. Maybe there is polycarbonate that doesn't. Autoglass is required to shatter into slightly dull bits.

Pitting would likely also be a problem causing reduced visibility. Aircraft stay above most land blown grit.
After 20 seconds the browser perform this "idle-cleanup" for you and there is no need to press this button all the time if you want to minimize memory usage.
Anti-PowerPoint Party in Switzerland wants to ban use of presentation software
git-annex

http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/databranches/ "databranches: using git as a database"

http://git-annex.branchable.com/ "git-annex is a git subcommand that allows tracking large files in git -- without the bother of feeding their contents into the git repository!"
This is the flaw that most people who argue for wireless mesh networks have.

I'm curious what you mean here. I am reasonably sure that mesh networks are actually distributed, at least internally. Are you referring about the Internet gateways that are generally a part of a mesh proposal, or possibly that mesh networks don't scale like centralized networks do?

A distributed or unregulated Internet is a pipe dream.

I think that we could create a truly distributed network. It would not be nearly as efficient as the Internet we are accustomed to, and it would not be based on the current Internet Protocol.
"What are the odds that this moment is the point when that finally stops happening?"

The problem is that the amount of value that could hypothetically be created isn't the limiting factor. Rather, there are at least a dozen different structural forces that are all aligning to prevent people who want to work from connecting with companies that want to create jobs. And while these problems could theoretically be removed with the stroke of a pen, they probably won't be for another few decades, at least in the U.S.
> Integrate with Mailchimp?

We are certainly going to make it easy to export and import your data.

One of the things we have tried to do is minimize the need to use third party services. You are certainly welcome to use something like Mailchimp (we do today), but hopefully we can provide simple alternatives to get you going at the beginning.
In practice crashes due to this issue simply do not occur very often. I think I've had the VM segfault twice in the last two or three years.

That's what makes the hyperbolic tone of this article so douchey; he wrote up an interesting dissection of an edge case issue as though it were an ongoing catastrophe, mostly just to inject a bunch of chest-thumping rock-star bravado that added nothing of value to the discussion.
Alex, thanks for the post. This is definitely how I read HN and the links to the learning resources has helped accelerate learning new material.
WxPython: Get the Event Name Instead of an Integer
Actually google does hotel pricing already in maps. It's not super obvious, but do a search for "hotels in San francisco" and you should see some prices
NeXT, effectively, acquired Apple for negative $429 million (and 1.5 million shares of Apple stock): As everyone knows by now, what began as an Apple purchase of NeXT has been turned inside out and become a NeXT takeover.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1997/03/2596

edit: I want to add a couple points to my followup.

1. NeXT's hardware was a resounding flop. Their state-of-the-art factory turned out to be for naught. This is absolutely true.

2. That said, this mistake did not prevent NeXT from co-opting Apple and becoming the third largest company (by market cap) in the world.

3. Apple == NeXT: Apple was, pun intended, rotten. Steve Jobs and his most trusted lieutenants assumed key positions of power throughout Apple. The only highly visible and critical Apple employee I can identify who pre-dated Steve's return to Apple is Jony Ive. However, Ive was laboring in obscurity before Steve assumed his position as "iCEO" of Apple[1 and 2].

4. Arguably, the iMac saved Apple. In one of the recently-posted WWDC or Macworld keynotes, Steve addresses this point in quite a bit of detail. The iPod made Apple a veritable powerhouse...but not at first[3]. The iPhone made Apple, well, Apple. As it happens, the iPhone (and OS X, and the iPad) is the result of decades of engineering work that started at NeXT[4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive#Career

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/091797apple.html

[3] http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-iP...

[4] Or, to be pedantic, at CMU, where Mach was originally co-developed by Avie Tevanian, who later became the SVP of Software Engineering at Apple.
Thanks. If you have suggestions, please drop us a note at support@kickofflabs.com.
wtf are you two talking about. The author never says anything about them "becoming public". He just says that after the 31st, all profiles will BE public (since they delete all private ones).
First, the author doesn't have a Google+ invite (neither do I, sad face). Makes speculation extra hard.

I think the privacy issue is the Achilles heel of Google+. Remember when anonymized queries were released for research purposes were released with gems like "kill my wife zipcode 94234". Well, now you have everything in one package: your location, searches, email, business infrastructure (if you use Google apps), pics, etc.

Google+ is the end of the "don't be evil" era. Not because they are evil now but because they're pulling out all the stops and not putting data in silos (even for show). Google+ is a lot more scary than Facebook because of the algorithmic component.

Going forward, their products will integrate with Google+ by default making it harder and harder to divest yourself from being tracked. They will make money off of this information, the question is how.