skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am learning Javascript, and following Crockford to do so. But one thing scares me: The Yahoo page is essentially unusable to me unless I turn off Javascript. It bogs my machine down (not that old, a couple of years and 4 gb of ram).

I don't want my site to behave like theirs. Is he somehow responsible for their site's architecture? I have trouble with both yahoo.com and my.yahoo.com- which I used to use quite a bit.
On windows you can use the testing/debugging HTTP proxy to simulate slow connections.
Or 'impact' when they mean 'affect', though sadly the battle is lost on that one...
When to Teach C++?
Can Low Prices Save the Tablet Market from Apple?
Warning - there are some serious NSFW images posted on the 'recent images' page.
I've discovered a data breach, what should I do?
I've just discovered a data breach - 80,000+ names, emails, addresses and birthdates all publicly available on Google. This is personally identifiable information.

The data owner is not responding. What should I do?
duck.net is owned by a squatter.
Too late :D
"Just quit my dead end 9-5 corporate job"

Should you be worried? I think you asked this question a bit late. You probably planned it that way. The answer doesn't really matter because worrying won't do anything to help you out.

Have a plan B. A big part of plan B is to work the networks you have to keep them from getting stale and expand into new networks. Every contact you have in your virtual Rolodex is a potential glass covering you can break in the event of an emergency. Those contacts will also help with your startup.

Another part of plan B is to keep an eye for where you would be going if the startup doesn't work out. If you are going to do freelance work, then where are you going to be looking for that work? Perhaps you should be sniffing around in those areas just in case (keep an eye out for prospects, make more connections, talk to people, etc.)

Three months doesn't give you a lot of wiggle room. A lot of this depends on your situation also. Three months living expenses could be something like $10.50 if you are living in your mothers basement. If you have a good number of expenses then taking care of all those with Freelancing will likely take you at least a couple of months unless you are well connected. You might try taking on small gigs here and there to extend your three months cushion and get a taste of doing client work.

Keep in mind that freelancing is yet another business. It's a hole that you get sucked into and your startup may take a back seat at times.

Good luck. Or, in the zombie scenario, Lock and Load!
As an avid user of my Open Pandora gaming console, and as one who grew up with 8-bit computers in his blood .. I found this article very interesting.

I've also asked myself the question whether the old games are still fun. I personally grew up with the Oric-1/Atmos range of 8-bit computers and have had a fantastic time re-building my old library of titles for this platform, for use with the Oricutron emulator. I still find these old games extremely fun to play - but maybe its just nostalgia, rather than game-excitement, I'm experiencing?

Regardless, there is also something very rewarding about introducing these old games to a new player - especially if that player is your 4-year old son, and you don't have to worry about explaining blood and gore and stats to him but can instead say "yes kid, you just have to rescue the princess from the giant ape!" .. ;)
Foreign press keept hostage at Rixos hotel in Tripoli, Libya
Using a software filter to "cure" a porn addiction is like hiding drugs from a heroin addict. It's ineffective, because the addict will just find another way to get their fix, and it doesn't address the underlying problem.

Treatment of addiction is relatively uniform, regardless of the object of addiction. The best advice for your friend would be to seek assistance that isn't technical. There are groups like AA for pornography addiction. Getting past the social stigma will be difficult, but once he's past it, I'd imagine things will get a lot easier.
Looking for a technical co-founder? Partner up instead.
How the cost to make a copy changes industry's revenue distribution (2006)
The Real Reason NYC Is Better Than Silicon Valley
Motorola’s Value to Google Found in 18 Patents
nginx + gunicorn + pgbouncer + postgres, S3/CloudFront for -all- media. The gunicorn app server sit behind one of Amazon's Elastic Load Balancers, but could just as easily be HAProxy.
Why Online Marketing is a Threat to Your Soul
The signal to noise ratio of Steve Blank is very high. I like this idea a lot. In the past I have been involved with firms who have done this on two dimensions: managerial competence and industry knowledge, or content knowledge and process knowledge. The circle is a great way to add another dimension to it.

The hard part seems to be the 2nd step - mapping the skills of the candidates to the description. It sounds easy, but rating soft skills is very difficult.

Thanks for sharing this!
Ha good sir, that is hilarious.
I second Sloppy. I've found it very useful for debugging Flash errors that only happen occasionally. By slowing the loading sometimes them become reproducible.
It's also useful to see how a webpage loads on a slow connection - for example: is your copy legible before your background image has loaded?
Create custom Portfolio tab on Facebook page
Should UA-sniffing for mobile content be standard?
Why is it that server-side user-agent sniffing for mobile content is pretty much standard now?
Developing in such a way is clearly considered bad practice for desktop browsers (hence projects such as jquery and modernizr).

You could possibly justify a different sub-domain for mobile content in order to reduce bandwidth and ease development. However, you shouldn't force a redirect to one or the other any more than you would force redirection to subdomains for foreign languages. Perhaps, as with localization, use detection to suggest a subdomain and then use cookies to store a preference.

Even if the devices do have different capabilities, a good front-end engineer would be able to work around this with techniques such as feature detection, graceful degradation and responsive design. If we don't change the most-common, current method soon, then we will end up developing for far too many different types of mobile devices in the future.

Refs: http://pinchzoom.com/posts/anatomy-of-a-html5-mobile-app/ or try http://www.google.com on a mobile and then a desktop
One look at how the author describes himself on twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/bnonn) clears this right up: "Direct response sharp-shooter D Bnonn Tennant—the dashing & debonair web copywriting ace & attention-thief for hire"
Why the GroupMe Deal Is Huge for NYC
Related: Amy Hoy on "Help Vampires"

http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
No, your confusion shows that - unlike the boy and half the media - you do understand the physics behind it just fine.
Interesting. # of patents is a very misleading metric, in the same sense that # of lines of code really doesn't tell you much about quality. My intuition on the purchase is not that each patent is worth ~ 2/3 of a million dollars (~17K patents, ~12bln purchase price - so the math is a little off) or even 1/4 of a of a million dollar (divide by the premium paid that day ~5mm). I assumed that there were a couple big ones hidden in there that had most of the value from a grand strategic point of view. This isn't about nickel and diming everyone on small things, it's about controlling a few of the big ones that will stand up in court.

That said, I wasn't smart enough to figure out which subset were valuable on my own. Thanks for sharing!
I bet you do, though - my experience of learning anything to a reasonable depth has been that I developed short-cut ways of doing things that are necessary but laborious to a beginner.

Maybe vi has a higher-than-average density of tricks due to its steep learning curve, but once you know them it's very capable.
At my job, we are running tornado w/ gunicorn and membase w/ haproxy to load balance (and not much else) and handling quite a bit of traffic. If I were to write my own from scratch I'd want to learn some erlang first ;)
I think most people's problem with vim and vi is that they just don't feel like crossing the river to get their water.
It's a matter of taste. Many people here prefer to use the mouse as little as possible, and from what I understand, that's not the direction sam has taken.
Trying to contact Google could be a good thing. They would probably remove it from their system so at least it's not searchable from Google and make it harder to find.
I know I'm in the minority in the Java world, but I prefer prefacing member variables in Java with m_.

I know there are myriad arguments about the editors being smart enough now to keep you from making the foo = foo instead of this.foo = foo mistake, but I just grew up on it and I like the clear obvious separation of 'that variable is a member variable' that m_ provides.

The rest of Hungarian notation though, never used it.

Oh and save the flames on m_, I've debated it to death, you aren't going to change my mind now. :)
The difference is, if you just do it mechanically, you'll never get faster at it - the limit is the speed at which you can hit keys in a coordinated manner, which is not going to improve much over time. Something that takes you 100 keystrokes and a mouse movement today will still take you that much in a year's time.

However, if, with a minute of thinking through the correct incantation, you can turn that into 10 keystrokes and no mouse movement, next time it will probably only take you 40 seconds to remember how to do it. Then, 30 seconds. Then, 20 second. Then, 10 seconds. Soon enough, if you do it often, it'll become automatic. And then you'll have locked in a more than 10x gain in productivity which would have been impossible the dumb way.

This is also the reason we spend years learning how to program instead of just copying and modifying bits by hand, by the way.
I've always been a per-project type of person. If the requirements are clearly defined up front, you as the developer don't need to worry about scope creep. Obviously, this is a double-edged sword if you find yourself in a position where something takes you longer than expected. But if that's the case, that's really your own fault - not the client's. It seems to be the most equitable basis IMO.
I've been wondering about this lately as our company is getting to a point where we'll need to get something in the works (we launch our beta in November). Sort of surprising to see that a lot of people copy/paste. If anything, seeing as how a lot of people on HN are software developers (primarily of SaaS apps), we should have a HN TOS that generally applies to web apps. Certain sections could be marked as needs to be edited so that company-specific language could be substituted. Seems appropriate considering the majority are going the copy/paste route. Thoughts?
股票行情
Response to Engadget's editorial on tablets
Gremlin makes these type of graph algorithms easy (https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki):

g = new Neo4jGraph('/tmp/neo4j')

// calculate basic collaborative filtering for vertex 1
m = [:]
g.v(1).out('likes').in('likes').out('likes').groupCount(m)
m.sort{a,b -> a.value <=> b.value}

// calculate the primary eigenvector (eigenvector centrality) of a graph
m = [:]; c = 0;
g.V.out.groupCount(m).loop(2){c++ < 1000}
m.sort{a,b -> a.value <=> b.value}

And Bulbs allows you to run Gremlin scripts from Python (http://bulbflow.com/).
Touchdroid - Android for the HP Touchpad
It's so funny seeing people scramble for something they didn't know they wanted 24 hours before, and not get it.

I went to a local Best Buy, which refused to drop the price. They stated they were shipping all the TouchPads back to HP. One gentleman apparently REALLY wanted a TouchPad, so even though he was there for the fire sale, he bought one at full price. My head exploded.
I'm able to easily type in a second word when I search. In the case of Java, I'm able to get the language, island, or coffee on the first search in google - for this 'princely' cost of searching correctly in the first place, I don't have to do the (apparently wonderful) ddg process:

1) visually skip the sizable disambiguation list

2) parse the main results, find they don't match (DDG is all about java language just like google on 'java')

3) go back and parse the disambiguation list

4) click the category to expand

5) parse the newly expanded list

6) click the relevant entry

7) wait for a new search

8) parse the main results again

I mean, seriously, a second word in your search is hardly cognitively onerous. Are we really so spoiled as to demand perfect results on short, ambigiuous topics?
Financing Options: Working Capital Financing
How to Hide/Encrypt HTML Source Code
Apple adds earthquake warning system to iOS5 in Japan
Automated testing tool QTP (Quick Test Professional)
I agree with all of this, except the operator overloading rant. Unless of course we extend it to forbiding overloading of any function name for more than one type.

I have done a bunch of mathematical programming in java, and you end up writing ".add()" a lot. Maybe .add is on a finite field. Maybe it is some matrices. Maybe complex numbers. I don't see what I am saving over operator overloading.

Of course, if I used .addFiniteField, .addMatrix, .addComplex, then I can see the (possible) benefit, of knowing how "heavy" the operation is at a glance. However, I don't think it is worth the cost, given I lose genericness.
Good post, and worth reading if you're stuck with vim and don't like it.

But, reading this reminds me of how much I like GUIs. Yup these movements are great. I get the appeal of turning selecting text into a dumb programming trick, I'm sure it makes you feel very clever and productive. Of course I can do all this stuff and more without even consciously thinking about it using a mouse.

Go do multi file grep in BBedit in front of an emacs jock one day. Look what I can do by finding a menu item!

Douglas Adams used to talk about how powerful formatting features in word processors were a great way to procrastinate.
Go West, Young Man
On Code Quality
A Digital Ronin: My year freelancing
As I mentioned in my earlier post I do not think it is the power of the type system that is key but its consistency and the accompanying tools. I am not saying programming in Coq or dependent types are the answer. I am asking, what if programmers had access to a more polished toolkit to create domain specific versions of djinn where it would guide them or help layout some basics? Knowing that the code was derived from sound axioms. Other engineers can quickly protoype the validity of their ideas by mechanically running through some equations, why not software engineers?

Already I use types in Haskell and F# to help me figure out how to layout the code - I write some basic code where I know which function it will feed into, I don't have to think much as I try to get the code to fit the types. Nothing fancy but still highly useful.

As for code transformation I don't mean generic stuff like Visual Basic to Java, I mean having a team able to write the tools themselves with full awareness of the requisite semantic mappings. Or even better, creating a dsl for the domain and then having that map down to appropriate platform specific code. But it need not be traditional development you could extend it to machine learning - say you are doing genetic programming to fit data, using types to have some level of axiomatic reasoning rather than random cross over may be fruitful. There are all sorts of uses where application of basic - not fancy theory is helpful.
It's amazing what American's will eat. But I bet it tastes good
This sounds like a good idea. I wish people would do randomized controlled trials on this sort of thing, but there are only a handful of companies that hire enough people to do RCTs, and I doubt any of them (except perhaps Google) would be willing to do something that isn't "best" to get more data even though, as things are now, no one can really know what's best.

There are a series of behavioral economics studies that show, in the right circumstances, that going with your gut is better than explicitly making a list of factors, assigning weights to them, and making a decision after that (whether that decision is algorithmically determined by the list, or is a holistic decision that comes after looking at the list). The ‘gut’ method tends to be better when decisions are more complicated, and have many factors, as is the case when hiring, so I suspect that pie method is one of those things that sounds helpful but isn’t. No one knows, though (unless there’s actually been a study on this; if there has, please, correct me if I’m wrong).
True, a rod or cone cell (collectively, "photoreceptors") is the smallest, indivisible detector unit in the retina, but in normal visual processing (i.e., daylight-lit scenes), they probably never operate in isolation. The photoreceptor signals are immediately integrated by accessory cells in the retina (horizontal cells, bipolar cells, amacrine cells) and the major output neurons of the retina, the ganglion cells projecting to the thalamus, exhibit "center-surround" sensitivity. Furthermore, any one photoreceptor can be used in many receptive fields in the downstream visual processing pathway.

Thus, the mapping of "pixels" to the number of retinal ganglion cells is probably less tenuous than a photoreceptor-to-pixel mapping. Now that I think about it, perhaps an even better definition of a physiological pixel would be a functional measure: the number of distinct, electro-physiologically measured center-surround fields in the thalamus. In that case, the effective megapixel rating of a human visual system is only indirectly related to the sheer numbers of photoreceptors, but more closely related to the wiring pattern. This wiring pattern is much more difficult to experimentally measure than simply counting neurons because it would involve flashing tiny, contrast-y dots of light in front of a fixated mammal while poking an electrode around in the thalamus. [This is outside of my main field, so it may have been done, but I don't know the results.]

Two side notes of interest:

1. Photoreceptors are oriented towards the rear of the retina and are embedded in a dark sheet of cells called the pigment epithelium. The upshot of this is that every photon that is involved in our visual perception has traversed a tangle of bipolar cells, ganglion cells, and their associated axons (it is easy to overlook this fact in diagrams, such as at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina , because it is usually only mentioned textually in the figure caption). The fovea is relatively free of these light-scattering objects and, in addition to a higher ratio and density of cone cells, is why primate visual acuity is highest in the fovea.

2. In extremely low light-adapted rod cells, the absorption of single photon can trigger photo-transduction. Thus, our visual system has the capacity to operate at the very limit of physics. If I recall correctly (i.e., no citation on hand), this has even been experimentally demonstrated, although the experiment must have been pretty demanding, what with photon shot noise and all. [This last side note #2 is what I had in mind when I referred normal visual processing in the first paragraph. Even though you might think that this validates the photoreceptor:pixel metaphor, at best a human would probably just report a tiny inkling of a flash in some general vicinity with very poor spatial and temporal resolution.] Ah, I now see ristretto mention that.
Grass on the Field
Wish I looked at the comments first!
Gowns shopping
What is a continuation and why should I care?
Pretty Little Liars Season 2 Episode 11
First, children and wives of the regime of Moammar Khadafy officials rushed to pack up and leave the hotel five-star Rixos. That the BBC's Matthew Price, the last reported condition of Tripoli.
Except that the complaints about Twitter's new interface are all related to Javascript performance, and have nothing to do with CSS. Their toolkit release was all about CSS.
Loved the image at http://mdcstockholm.com/filestorage/gallery/5.jpg

The only thing that worries me is that our Moon seems awfully close. Tides and quakes would be a huge problem. That's why they appear to need such massive computing power - for quake prediction.
Ask: C++ or C#?
Hello,
Which programming language do you prefer between C++ or C#?
Nokia.com website Hacked by pr0tect0r
New trailer for Metropolis(1927)with score by NIN
HP ran its webOS SDK on iPad 2, hopes to license it as mobile web app tool
Flame suit on, but I really don't understand the appeal.

I have reams of arcane bits of information to commit to memory already. .Net in two languages plus VB6 for legacy code. SQL in more dialects than I care to list, each with their own quirks and limitations. HTML and JavaScript. XML and various associated technologies like XPath. That's just professionally; once I go home I can add in photography and music straight off with others at different levels.

There's only so many things one can usefully commit to memory (edit - yes, I meant am prepared to dedicate the time to committing to memory); odd bits are just easier to look up. So why, exactly, should I voluntarily use a text editor whose interface was already far behind the state of the art when I started school?

:q!. I've had others try to persuade me of the joys and power of vi; I'm not even slightly convinced and that is the one command I'm committing to memory.
HP Touchpad Review
Ask HN: What is the best Amazon Web Services book?
I'm finally diving into AWS and I'd like a comprehensive guide to help me. Can anyone recommend a solid book for mastering Amazon Web Services?
The reports I've seensay they had a live datalink (I guess one-way only) which lasted nine minutes. They said they're happy with the data anyway, even though they don't know where it crashed (technically they don't even know it crashed, only that it stopped sending data), so they're clearly not relying on a black-box.
Thanks for the idea but this falls outside Google's criteria for reporting personal info in search results: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...

Basically they say 'tell the site owner to remove it...'
> Of course I can do all this stuff and more without even consciously thinking about it using a mouse.

One of the reasons vi/vim is so much faster for me is that there isn't a need to move between the mouse and keyboard with the requisite hand/eye/mouse/re-home coordination. Yes the key combos are bizarre, but so is the querty keyboard layout for that matter. Once you learn it, your fingers act as a direct connection between your brain and the editor. A mouse can't do that.
Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany
because it may contain music for which GEMA has
not granted the respective music rights.

I hate these music industry pricks. Why did they block this? Because he's listening to some web radio in the background? That's ridiculous.
Crockford didn't even work for Yahoo until sometime after 2002, long after the Yahoo site had been built out. And I believe he works there in "senior member of the very wise tool-building research staff" mode. Based on the biographical sources I've seen, I don't believe he's officially in charge of the YUI library, yet alone any of the rest of Yahoo.
In the end, it's wrong to try to determine how many "megapixels" the eye can see, as its not a camera and everything before and after the optic nerve perform a number of enhancements / processing of the signal, so what matters in the end is what is perceptible and discriminable under specific lighting conditions.