skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think state law pre-empts groupon's policy (Ca's law states it cannot expire unless the card is to multiple retailers and then it must clearly list the expiration date on it).
The activity stream just feels pointless for me. Favourites, I don't care, if it's worth me reading then they can retweet it. Retweets, they show up in my stream, if I want to see them specifically I could under the old system thanks to the specific retweets page. Who my friends start following just isn't interesting, and just wastes the space.

And I disagree with TechCrunch's "oh, people hate change, they're not thinking rationally" theory. When newtwitter beta launched last year (I guess 11-12 months ago, can't quite remember) I thought it was cool for about ten minutes, then hated it, and switched back to original twitter, where I stayed until the move was forced last week. In the week I've been using it solidly, I still hate it. And I'm not exactly on my own, EVERY friend I have that uses twitter either moans regularly about newtwitter, or has switched to an external client to avoid using it. Sure, that's a bunch of specific cases not an overall study, but it shows it's not a rare opinion to have.
Perhaps they should take a look at how east German cities were and are coping with a shrinking population?
WordPress sites get hacked because the owner fails to update the platform or install 3rd party scripts/plugins without any sort of logical research.

This can be said about any platform, regardless of the language.
Thanks! Will work on those shortly.
Good question. Appears that they use contextual fear conditioning to assess memory.

From the research article:
"We chose to use the immediate-shock fear conditioning paradigm (Fanselow, 1990; Rudy et al., 2002) as the learning task. Here, foot shock is delivered very quickly upon exposure to the experimental context on the fear conditioning day. However, the rats are preexposed to the context at an earlier time. The preexposures are required so that the subjects are able to form a 'conjunctive representation' of the context, so that it can be associated with the shock on the conditioning day (Rudy et al., 2002). We chose this fear conditioning paradigm because it is highly and specifically dependent on the hippocampus (Rudy et al., 2002), and we have already shown that E. coli interferes with memory of this task in aging rats (Barrientos et al., 2006)"
Big Screen Little Screen. Why one web design layout does not fit all.
Mobile web traffic now accounts for nearly 1% of all Internet traffic and almost 7% in the U.S. alone. That’s a serious amount of pinching and dragging.
I swear to god my memory of my early lurking on HN was you contributing in a way that I learned something, but since I registered (and you had an exit), you seem more content in fucking with people. I just don't get it.
It astounds me that Facebook would release a new messaging app, and it's still not a hybrid iPhone/iPad app. Still have to put up with crappy scaling.

Seriously, what's with you guys?
"Lunch is for wimps." - Gordon Gekko
Interesting article.

I remember reading somewhere the opposite hypothesis. The argument went like this:

more exercise --> faster metabolism --> faster consumption of your body utilities --> lower life expectancy
Ultimate Income Booster
Ultimate Income booster is created by a famous online marketer call Douglas Williams!Douglas Williams has provide many type of method to make money online !Now Douglas has create a brand new product call Ultimate Income booster actually is come along a powerful software tool !
Bussard's ramjet is too far fetched still. I meant more along the lines of http://www.emc2fusion.org/2006-9%20IAC%20Paper.pdf and http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/InterStellar/Explorer_Cl...

The EMC2 is (was) his corporation that gets [though very small compare to other causes government spends money on] real funding and making real progress today, just as we speaking :) though i'd not discount the Z-pinch (Sandia) approach and think that ultimately working system may be a combination of these 2 approaches. The Z-pinch, dense plasma focus and other similar dynamic (inertial) confinement approaches is, in principle, the Orion, only with very small "bombs".
I think groupon has gotten a huge boost from retailer desperation since the 2008 crash. They haven't existed in a normal economy. Not only might businesses decide they are not a good solution in hard times, but in the longer term as the economy recovers, they'll likely have less interest as well.
Scarling » Kestrel (Twitter's tiny queue system)
What comes after reading on iPad? (Khoi Vinh's startup)
For what it's worth, a fellow hacker/attendee of DEF CON has contacted me to confirm Coderman's reports.

He wasn't willing to say much else, only that the attack was very sophisticated and likely to be the work of top-notch professionals.
I bought the PDF of this book this morning, printed it out, and read it during lunch. I think it's actually very good and plan on giving it to my kids to read.

The discussion on number bases and converting from binary, hex, and decimal systems was nicely presented. And the part on endianness might not be necessary at this basic level, but it's nicely done.

Heck, it's a pretty good deal for $3, IMHO.
"Art" Is Not the Opposite of "Fun"
Your profile does not really explain why you do what you do (it basically repeats what you've said here). Care to expand?
I haven't read this book, so I don't know what it's actually like. I could be completely wrong about this. However, if in my first days of programming I was given a book on low level details such as signed vs. unsigned numbers, I wouldn't have wanted to become a programmer right then.

My programming career started with Webmonkey's PHP tutorial[1], when it was first published some years ago. It doesn't talk about floating point operations or binary representations. Instead, you first learn how to print "I am the CHICKEN MAN" in your browser. Shortly after, you're taught to use forms, and by then you've created something that takes input and processes it.

You type your stuff in, click the button, and it shows up in the browser. The code you wrote -- this strange language that seems like magic -- clearly works. You've made the machine do something. Just to make sure, you type something else in, click the button, and there it is. That's what inspired me to become a programmer. The ones and zeros came later.

[1] http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/php_tutorial_for_beginners/ (I don't recommend this tutorial to anyone learning to program. It was useful when it was written, but it's not up to date, and some of the examples are broken. In 2011, there are lots of good beginner books.)
I think the canonical example of this would be how Rovio found the inspiration for "Angry Birds" in the flash game "Crush the Castle".
From the look of the article the google maps solution is using lagged traffic flow data as a basis of directing waves of traffic. I think in practice, if this had a large uptake rate, by directing cars to areas with low traffic rates, you would inadvertantly cause traffic jams even though you send "waves" to other areas in a subsequent time period.

I like the idea of a traffic utopia where cars are directed around in the most efficient way, However i think that this can only realistically work with open information sharing, (not competition) between the major players i.e. Garmin, tomtom etc to increase take up rates.
Am I the only person who brings lunch from home? Eating out every day gets expensive.
Twitpic Founder Launches Twitter Clone
LinkedIn's Algorithm Taps Talent Graph, But Still Needs Human Touch
For those who may have missed a great discussion on "lunch at the office" a few months ago from a Joel Spolsky blog post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2494398
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/04/28.html
It's fake. But a really good fake.
That's fascinating. Thanks for the links.
Audio books are nice, if the person speaks really clearly on them.
New cancer treatment reprograms immune system
See Enlive from the Clojure world. This is the detailed explanation of why Enlive rocks - https://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial
> WordPress sites get hacked because the owner fails to update the platform

Why are the updates even necessary? If you are still on Rails 2.3.8, you aren’t getting hacked just because you didn’t move to Rails 3 yet. But the situation with Wordpress & its ecosystem seems waaay less secure by default.

> This can be said about any platform, regardless of the language.

Not to the same degree, no sir.
New Twitter features
Software dev isn’t just a logical process
Hahaha... yes. Silly me :)
I wonder if you could solve some of the issues by building each component in an FPGA and wiring up as appropriate to simulate the timing/sync better vs. emulating the entire system at once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onBmiHoOxGs
Huh— it's more than I would have guessed, but thinking about it, I buy it. Anecdotally, an eighth a week is about the point where you can see it starts to slow people down.

I can't help but feel like it's got as much to do with the fact of smoking every day as with the raw amount... I guess there aren't that many people out there who'll smoke an eighth in a day and then take a week off, though, so maybe it'd be hard to pin down.
The Facebook Scare That Wasn’t
It's mostly lucky (or unlucky) that the constant benchmark now optimizes away to nothing. As I mentioned in the comments (replying to that commenter), my point was to show that the overhead of constant lookup is now nearly zero, so if the values aren't used they won't be accessed. The actual work done for constants that don't disappear would be roughly equivalent to a simple memory access...very fast indeed.

I will probably do future posts with less synthetic benchmarks, but it's ultimately just hard to benchmark a specific language feature in the presence of optimizations like the JVM performs.
This is a dream coming true. I wish I could be part of the team in that space ship. I'd do anything to actually be a part of space travel. That's all I want in my life.
I used to think that this content (the new activity feed) being hard to get was an intentional, thoughtful design. It felt nice in contrast with using Facebook, which gives me an unpleasant feeling of everybody observing every single action I make. Turns out Twitter sees it as a missing feature.
I can hear it now... "but how do I do it in jQuery?!"
Google retiring Android App Inventor
Bumblephone - Computer Phone for Kids (Twilio)
Oh, absolutely! Except that they're more prevalent in PHP applications than anything else. It's simply way, way too easy to do the wrong thing. If you want to introduce XSS into, say, a Rails app, it's significantly more difficult; generally, you have to explicitly throw something back as 'raw'. Sure, some PHP frameworks handle it the same way, but it's rare to see this in the real world.

While testing apps, PHP immediately throws up red flags -- it's simply not likely to be done right. It can be, but it's very rare.
Facebook: We Aren’t Stealing Your Phone Numbers
The best way to predict the future [traffic] is to create it! :)
MediaCore Raises Seed Funding
Totally off topic, but do you happen to know anything about capsaicin?

I began eating hot peppers a few months ago and it had a dramatic impact on my condition. CF is rooted in a defect in a cell channel, the CFTR, which handles trafficking of certain molecules into and out of the cell. Capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot peppers, forces a different channel open at lower than normal temps. I asked around and got a snippet or two suggesting some indirect relationship between the types of things the two channels process but nothing conclusive. Capsaicin has worked effectively as a biohack for me, especially when combined with walking (and a zillion other things I was already doing for my condition). Yet I have turned up little in the way of solid information as to why/how.
上海最好的男科医院
This leaves out the state and local part of the picture. The federal stimulus spending minus state and local cutbacks only ended up being around a $100 billion net spending increase. This was minuscule compared to the magnitude of the drop in consumer demand after the burst of the bubble.

(I'm excluding TARP which is more complicated; it isn't quite $700 billion in spending if ends up getting partly repaid, however, aside from the part that doesn't get paid back, there was also an opportunity cost)
Best way to promote your web app:
http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=341138

Getting PR for your startup:
http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/8/jason-calacanis-on-how...

Preparing for launch:
http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/04/18/preparing-for-l...

Startup marketing advice:
http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketi...
Groupon IPO dented by market, new numbers
Are you saying that Wordpress development isn't painful? Have you ever done any?
I do like that parsing the claims and determining what is being described is actually harder than designing the system from scratch when you actually finally figure out what the hell the patent is actually about.
Startup Profile: 1FTP - Making FTP Not Suck.
Microsoft v. i4i
I also graduated from U of M, and then moved to Chicago, and I know others who have. Originally born and raised in Michigan.
My girlfriend just told me about a study that also seemed to show that exercise can be useful in treatment of schizophrenia (by promoting hippocampal development).

This appears to be the study (she read it in Psychology Today, which didn't reference it by name):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20124113
A Programmer's Life
Every time Twitter announces a new feature I grit my teeth, clench my sphincter and rasp, mostly to myself, "What. About. Spam."

It mystifies me that they're content to do so little as this slowly but surely erodes the quality of the Twitter experience. Between scale and spammer volume, I get that it's not an easy problem. But give me something, here.
Here's the text of claim 1, with extra paragraphing and bracketed letters added:

--snip--

1. A method of providing notification of impending delivery of a shipment shipped by a shipper to a shipping address specified by a customer, comprising:

[a] periodically querying, by a broker computer system independent of the shipper and a merchant and which enabled the customer to purchase an item contained in the shipment from the merchant, a shipper computer system to obtain status information for the shipment with each query,

[b] wherein a periodic query of the shipment computer system comprises:

[b1] requesting status information from the shipper computer system by providing a shipment identifier of the shipment to the shipper computer system; and

[b2] receiving status information in response thereto;

[c] responsive to status information obtained with a periodic query indicating an estimated delivery date for the shipment,

[c1] halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and

[c2] scheduling the restart of periodic queries of the shipper computer system a day prior to the estimated delivery date;

[d] restarting, by the broker computer system, periodic queries of the shipper computer system the day prior to the estimated delivery date to obtain updated status information with each query;

[e] responsive to updated status information obtained with a periodic query indicating that the shipment is out for delivery to the customer,

[e1] halting, by the broker computer system, the periodic queries and

[e2] calculating an estimated delivery time for the shipment based at least in part on the status information; and

[f] sending, by the broker computer system, an electronic message including the estimated delivery time to the customer.

--snip--

The USPTO file history is available at http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair. You have to submit the patent number (7,996,328) to the search engine and go through a CAPTCHA; a direct link to individual documents in the file history doesn't seem to work.

On 12/24/2008, the patent examiner initially rejected the claims as directed to non-statutory subject matter (a "section-101 rejection"), as well as to being directed to subject matter that would have been obvious in view of the prior art (a "section-103 rejection").

Google's attorneys argued that the examiner should drop the section-101 rejection, and amended the claims to overcome the section-103 obviousness rejection in a filing on 4/24/2009.

On 7/22/2009, the examiner agreed to drop the section-101 rejection, but cited new grounds for the section-103 obviousness rejection.

NOTE: The examiner's withdrawal of the section-101 rejection was almost a year before the Supreme Court's decision in the Bilski case concerning business methods, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-964.pdf; at this point there's no way to know whether the examiner would have considered the claims to be unpatentable under Bilski for being directed to an abstract idea.

After more amendments and a telephone conference between Google's attorneys and the examiner on 10/22/2010, the claims were finally allowed on 3/31/2011.
155 million American mobile phone users don’t use smartphones
Well, the study is called "[A] Little Exercise, Big Effects", not "More Exercise, More Results."
New Meteor Shower Discovered; May Uncover New Comet
How the London riots showed us two sides of social networking
This company is killing it. Real, serious revenue and they haven't even scaled yet. Do some research before you criticize.
'Haters gonna hate' is all very cute, but seems to be interchangeable with 'I don't listen to criticism'.
just "using a weak anecdote" against a weak anecdote.
I'm curious what percentage of their customer base is startups and what percentage is other types of businesses (ie, businesses they'll encounter in other markets than the valley).

Will they be signing up all the large ad agencies on Michigan Ave when they hit Chicago? Or is this more for the 10-40 person "in the know" startup?
I'm actually intrigued by this. I've pretty much stopped using FTP because it's easier to email files or use a web based file sharing service for very large files, but if someone actually managed to reinvent FTP that would be awesome.
Competing Goals in IPO Pricing
Funny, of all the recent YC companies I've been reading about lately, this one makes the most sense to me.

They provide a real service that lots of people (judging from these comments) seem to appreciate, which is easily monetizeable. In addition, I can see some great economies of scale here, including cheaper food due to mutually beneficial deals with restaurants.
Guy Kawasaki video on selling your company/product
Former Airbnb Employees Launch Gusta- Supper Club Reservation Platform
Solution to Defcon 19 badge mystery
I've not read any of the "The Good Parts" series, so I can't comment from personal experience, but I've heard that Crockford's book is the only good one in that series. He wrote it, and he wrote it well, and then O'Reilly decided to base a series about it, but didn't get authors who could write those books to the same standard.
Thanks to PHP or in spite of PHP?
Pendulum waves
The problem with FTP starts with the protocol. It's tragic that this startup doesn't use something like SFTP.
Great idea. I thought I'd take this for a spin to discuss http://www.limelightapp.com/ . Signing up using Facebook was easy enough. However, once I started bidding on available time slots I got confused. I'm over bidding on some time slots, but I'm not becoming the winning bid and the time slot still shows a lower current bid. It says my bid is placed successfully, but obviously it's not. :) I guess I'll just have to settle for 20 minutes. :)
> From the look of the article the google maps solution is using lagged traffic flow data as a basis of directing waves of traffic.

I wonder if they have plans to use the destination address as another basis as this gets more traction. As the number of users grow this can help estimate where traffic will be after time passes. Google can then become that central authority of ultimately routing cars in selfless directions for maximum efficiency. It would alleviate traffic simply by showing red on the other routes, discouraging them. This red is then the predicted heavy traffic. Or rather: follow the red path and you will cause traffic.
Meh, launching objects at structures to collapse them is a pretty common concept. Catching fish, throwing them in the air and shooting them is a bit different I guess.

I find it very strange that in this crazy age of software patent mutual destruction, cloning games is such an open field.
This thread from last year makes for an interesting read in the light of the numerous accounting revisions. Of course, we doubters might to turn out to have egg on our faces yet.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967975
Toasted bread was patented in 2000:

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=IpwDAAAAEBAJ
Malware Secretly Attaches Stolen Data to Photos
I know nothing of the book that is being mentioned here, but various policies in the mid-20th century DID force the breakup of the traditional ethnic neighborhoods.

It's not an issue as simple as black and white. I live in an area that in the 1960's had thriving Irish, Italian and Polish catholic communities. Community being the key word -- these folks lived, worshipped and attended school together. They were tight groups of people, who still maintain ties today.

The reality of this is a loss of community in general -- read the book "Bowling Alone", which describes the decline of civic life in America, and isn't written by a kook. My children are almost certainly not going to know the names of more than half of the people who live in our city block with about 40 homes. In my childhood (back in the 70's and 80's), we knew everyone.
Individual employees don't pay for zerocater, their employers do.

If you do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation involving the hourly wage of a software engineer (for example), and the amount of time saved by not going out for lunch then it's a no-brainer for most employers to do this.
It may just be a side effect of PHP's problems, but even the wrong comments tend to be extremely useful when you run into something weird when coding. Of course it's always more fun to bash people & programming languages, so maybe I'll just join in: that bloody Ruby API reference lacks any comments from users who might have noticed something that's causing a strange bug in my script.
I am not very familiar with Perl. When you say different operators for strings and numbers are you referring to something similar to PHP's === operator for which "1"===true would be a false statement?
The year's best astronomy photos
As the number of users grow this can help estimate where traffic will be after time passes.

Fascinating, thanks for this insight. It reminds me somewhat of how Google can predict flu outbreaks better than the CDC based on users' queries.
Exactly. Amazon's acquired land was defensible, so to speak. Once it acquired a customer, that customer was likely to stick around.

As the numbers show, Groupon can only get 20% of all first time users to buy something. And yet, it counts all prospects as "customers." And even for those who do buy a groupon or two, what reason would they have to stay loyal to Groupon? At best, Groupon is poised to become one of many big commodity providers in this market.

(Speaking of Amazon, btw, what's to stop them from getting into this market eventually?)
I think you're going to have a hard time with this one on HN.

Myself, I don't like it. But then again I don't think I'll ever be rich...