skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if we can't get away from lookism, we need to have ways to redistribute the effects, right? We do it with smarts (if we assume that, in the aggregate, smart people make more money), so why not with good looks? So, attractive people need to sleep with the uglies, and the more attractive they are, the more they should do it. We'll add a few fields to tax forms where you enter your hotornot.com score, and a few months later if you're ugly you get sex coupons to spend and beautiful people get an assigned amount of sex coupons to collect.

(I usually use this argument to argue against wealth redistribution and progressive taxing, but I guess it works the other way around too ;) )
Thoughts on Why You Should Have a Side Project
I don't know about the others, but I think the bug bounty is a good idea. I mostly went over the code so I could learn something about good C coding conventions. Plus I wanted to try out tarsnap without having to go through the hassle of getting access to a credit card; the bug bounty is pretty helpful for that use case.
Astronomers: We've found a planet made of diamond
I think the point is more that 99% of the time websites shouldn't be doing the things Flash does well.
There are ways this story fails in practice, like the "language mismatch" I mentioned.

For example, in Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java to JavaScript, theoretically the static type information should be a huge boon to optimization. And indeed, the compiler does some fancy stuff, including static inlining, and segmenting the code so that chunk 2 is only downloaded when a method call crosses the boundary of chunk 1.

However, consider something like a HashMap. A JavaScript programmer might use a single JS object as a hash, whereas the GWT programmer has the luxury of using a java.util.HashMap, which is theoretically compiled down to something efficient, maybe just as efficient. In practice, this is hard or impossible for the compiler, and HashMaps are compiled to a system of objects that's much more complex. There are great reasons for this -- primarily, HashMaps can have any object as a key, not just a string; also the nature of the HashMap API and behavior under subclassing -- but the result is if you want something fast, you need to use a FastStringMap or some such class, backed by a "native" JS object. But in general, when you're not worrying about performance, you might find yourself using many HashMaps, even parsing JSON into nested HashMaps! So now each JS object is represented by a bunch of JS objects needed to make the mechanics of the HashMap abstraction work.

I worry that not having arrays leads to a similar problem. In magic happy land, a call like List.pop that removes the last element of a list would be implemented as a tail-recursive operation on heads and tails, which the compile would then recognize and turn back into a call to Array.pop! In practice, this kind of thing is unlikely. As with HashMaps, the programmer is forced (or told) to use heavyweight data structures to simulate lightweight ones, with the hope that the compiler will recognize that this is a case where the lightweight structure applies and transform it back!

As for "online" compilation, I guess this is easier on the JVM. Clojure, Rhino, Scala, and Java are all compiled and can be set up to recompile on the fly after every change to the program. Node.js too. Having developed this way, I don't think I could go back to having to do anything after changing the code besides reloading the page.
"Ask a Physician" has something to say about this: http://www.askamathematician.com/?p=6657
Turismo responsabile-Blog di Raffaella Milandri
Cool, looks interesting. I look forward to checking out its features.
Not yet. There's still a good deal of stuff that needs to happen before the acquisition can proceed.
You know what would be really nice on a gaming laptop? A foot pedal. It would actually be really nice for browsing too. As it is, I don't use my feet for anything... it's only intuitive that a foot pedal should be developed.
This app (Spottmusic.com aka Spot Twitter Music) builds a profile for you and the ones you follow with all music shared on twitter from Spotify.
I have never seen these side by side. I'd also like to see a normal car going 80mph.
The Social Network with Muffins
One place to start would be the Schiehallion Experiment of 1774 where a symmetric and isolated mountain in Scotland was used as the basis of an experiment to measure how much the gravitational attraction of the mountain pulled a pendulum away from the vertical. The goal being to estimate the mass of the Earth - with what turns out to have been a reasonably accurate result.

During the course of the experiment they had to measure the shape of the mountain quite carefully and they had the idea to join points of similar height together with a line on the map - inventing contour lines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion_experiment
> For example, it is discouraging to log in to HN and see that your karma has fallen since your last visit.

To counter this, all we would need to do is define what rate of karma inflation is acceptable, then adjust all displayed karma ratings to compensate.
IIRC C was not context free, a requirement for BNF. The problem was in variable declarations, probably structures, but I dont remember the details. (It may have been fixed by C99.) It is often possible to transform a grammar from context sensitive to context free by trickery in the lexer. Because of this I dont recommend C as a first compiler language, although it makes an excellent target language.
His point is that he looks stereotypically Western and therefore is considered more attractive than most Chinese natives or Asians generally by Asians and the Chinese themselves. He's making no claims about how attractive he actually is, but that he has first hand knowledge of the difference between being perceived as nothing too special in the looks dept. and being perceived as probably in the top 1% of good looking people in a certain culture.

I can attest to this as well. I lived in Korea for a good while, and let me tell you, it doesn't get any better than being a white blond, blue eyed male or female of any sort (as long as not gay or fat) in SE Asia, and from what I hear, basically every other part as well. We be some sexy, foreign beasts. And I, too, am just an otherwise average looking guy.
"Today, there hasn't been a single PC laptop that anyone has been passionate about for the longest time. It's not because there's no innovation, but [because] the big PC guys just don't want to innovate anymore," Min-Liang Tan, the CEO and Creative Director of Razer, told Ars.

Completely true. For example Lenovo/Thinkpad stopped producing the 4:3 screens that all their business users loved. Too hard/expensive to produce, 16:9 screens are the future, etc.

Until Apple produces millions and millions of 4:3 iPad displays. Now can we reopen the discussion?

I don't think Razer's expensive hardware and new UI is the answer, but that doesn't mean every PC laptop needs to ship with a just a shitty touchpad and 2 buttons. How about a 3rd button? A mousewheel? Start small and build from there.

The part I really don't understand is how the PC mouse industry is so innovative/over-the-top. 7 buttons, independent DPI controls, lazer tracking, ergonomic designs, etc. But then every laptop has the same terrible small touchpad and two badly-designed buttons. Seems like adding a 30-cent mousewheel to your case would instantly differentiate you from all your competitors.
Instaban please.
Your problem is exactly what I like about it. I've found much richer discussion than I ever had on Facebook or Twitter precisely because of the fact that it fits the niche of Facebook and personal blogs but doesn't entirely capture the blog area. If it attempted to more completely capture the blogging aspect then I could imagine it getting problematic really quickly, though.
> On spherical earth the horizon on average is a little over three miles away.

I read (long time ago) that the horizon is 29km on a seashore. In other words if you see a ship disappear on a horizon, it was 29km away. And so his 3mi vs my 29km is a bit of a discrepancy. Can anyone set things straight here?
Show HN: subscription flowers (to keep the significant other happy)
After constantly forgetting to buy my wife flowers (and not hearing the end of it), I've got a ghetto MVP that is already keeping me out of trouble. Happy wife FTW!

Feedback? Love/hate?

http://remembertheflowers.com
I can't really imagine anyone in the FPS/RTS crowd wanting to look down on their keyboard during gameplay. Normally you have to set their chair on fire if you want them to break eye-contact with the main-screen...

Perhaps there are slower paced games where this makes sense, though.
Regarding the perceived gravity on a cube planet, the movie Sunshine tries to portray accurate physics for a similar situation. It has great sci-fi visuals, though the end gets a bit... silly.
Losing weight won’t solve the health care cost crisis
Story behind the TIME magazine Gaddafi cover art
Open Directory Project - What Is the Open Directory Project
Open directory project is the form of the directory which is open to everyone and it is used by the World Wide Web for the purpose of linking different directories. The open directory project is used
Just because Flash is available for Android phones doesn't mean people have it installed.
Suggestions on making a PHP / Javascript / MySQL framework?
Weird Children Of Video Games and Neuroscience
The demo is impressive. I guess many people would be interested in this. I would pitch it on Forrst and Dribble where a lot of designers hang out.

From the demo I see that most dimensions are determined the wysiwyg way. Can you serve different resolutions like those used by smartphones, tablets, PCs/Macs and printers and are the layouts fluid?
I created Stasis because jekyll wasn't versatile enough and nanoc seems a bit overly complex for what it is doing. I am trying to strike a good balance with Stasis.
Salesforce CEO gave up the 'App Store' trademark for advice from Steve Jobs
This estimate is accurate. I decided to total my tuition for a computer engineering degree at UBC (started in 2005) and it comes to $26,797 - before tax, without housing, and all other mandatory school fees included. Those who are starting now will probably pay a few more $K in the coming 4 years.
What AT&T-Mo tells us about transparency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Distance_to_the_horizon

Wikipedia says 3.1 miles.
It does, but the link is broken. You can find it here...

http://20bits.com/articles/network-programming-in-erlang/
Are you seriously proposing that Apple has some monopoly on the idea of a rectangle with rounded corners? There's only so many practical shapes that a laptop can be.
I want everyone to know that I am the one who posted the question at Stack Overflow. I am new here and unsure if this type of practice is okay or not. If it is not then please kindly ignore it, but I figured you guys would be more familiar with the problem I am asking and be better able to lend a solution. I tried to make the question as informative and descriptive as I could. I am trying to launch my first startup (who isn't) which is more or less done if I could only figure out how the damn data-flow is going to work. On a side-note, hacker news is awesome and I love this website. Cheers! -Nick (first submission here)
Reddit Traffic has Exploded in 12 Months
question - why is everyone making alumninium unibody notebooks ? Is carbon fiber not lighter and (arguably) just as strong.
Is it just the design aesthetic that everyone is trying to reach out for or is there something else.
Robert Scoble actually blogs on G+. Other people do too.
I'm looking at this on an MBP right now and pretty much all of the details are different except for... a similar shape and keyboard type? What do you want out of them?
The "distance to the horizon" is strongly dependant on how high the viewer is and how tall the object being observed is. If you put your eyes pretty much down to the ground the horizon will be pretty darn close. If you are standing 6 feet tall the horizon will be 3 miles away. If you're standing a bit higher up on the shore and looking at the top of a tall ship then 29 kilometers is easy to achieve. I'm providing a link to a handy calculator. You have to add the results from both the height of the viewer and the viewed object.
http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm
Link: http://remembertheflowers.com
The meta insight seems to be that you should never trust
what customers say, only what they do. Other areas where
this applies is user testing ("No, I don't think it's that
difficult to use.") and marketing ("This ad looks way
better than that.").

One more area: (most) female dating advice. "I want a sweet nice guy" vs "all my ex-es were jerks". Guess who she's attracted to.
First Look at the Google Catalogs User Experience
This looks like a very cool project, but how many of these tools do we need and how can we differentiate between them? Just in the Ruby world we now have: Webgen, Webby, Nanoc, Staticmatic, Jekyll, Ace, SassRoku, Hobix, Middleman +++ If we include Python, Node and Perl, there should be plenty more to choose from.
I would personally rather have my product or service good enough that customers will market it for me.

To me, being featured in a publication like TechCrunch would only be exciting because of the traffic. Too many people see it as validation for their product/service when it's anything but.
A/B testing your pricing? Do people really do that?

I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end when your customers find out about that one.
Ask HN: Recommend a book on Machine Learning and/or Graph Theory?
Hey HN'ers.

A couple of us are part-way through developing our next app (http://pageradius.com/), and the more we get into it, the deeper we're getting into machine learning and graph theory (including frequent itemsets, association rules, bayesian classification, clustering, and so on).

We've scoured the web for as much info as we can and are making pretty good progress, but really want to get stuck into a solid, well-edited book that explains these concepts clearly - we're really loving these subjects.

Any recommendations?

Thanks!
Agreed, the calculation that

($ spent on anti-terrorism) / (# of people killed in terrorism) = ($/citizen saved from terrorism)

makes me think that this article was not very well thought-out.
URL Shorteners In Under Two Minutes | Games from Within
Good stuff - very succinct. But... the basics of Erlang are very straightforward and tutorials are plentiful. There really should be more articles on the things that set Erlang apart (OTP design principles etc) written in the style of this article.

UPDATE: One of the reasons I'm not writing aforementioned articles is my inability to convey what I mean. What I really meant to say: "Very succinct. The articles this guy will produce in the future will be very beneficial to the community."
Oh neat, I initially thought it still had a normal trackpad centered under the keyboard but that is just a small bevel for opening the laptop.

Having the trackpad on the right makes a lot of sense, hopefully we start seeing more laptops that do this.
New Social Commerce Idea - Please provide feedback
F*CK IT, WE'LL DO IT LIVE111 LIVE CODING
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's easier to cast and mill the aluminum unibody than it is to mold the carbon fiber.

Probably cheaper, as well.
From my personal experience you have to keep at it. We are a small team (http://infostripe.com) and we go in cycles of development and promotion. Throughout our beta as we reached each major milestone we have turned to journalists and tech blogs for coverage. With varying degrees of success.

Honestly it's hard to get attention when you are small, without major funding or in the right network circles. But we have pushed on and with each major update we get a little more traction with coverage and learn from our efforts. Our users love us but convincing the filters that be that we are worth their 500 words is a challenge that we underestimated. Thanks for your post, there are some good points in there and has provoked some interested responses.
Theyve been around for a long time - http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/fs-savant-elite.htm
Yeah, it really comes down to implementation. I especially love the mobile apps that don't let you use your back button past their home page. Once you are there, that's it, you're locked in!
Unless your app is trivial it won't appeal to only one type of person so you're going to have to model multiple types anyways.

For instance, the inbox cleaning utility mentioned - it could be used by busy CEOs whose time is money, and by computer-illiterate people like the stereotypical grandparents who need frequent access to the same tool despite having ample time to shop around on price. You need to advertise to both group independently or you won't get either.

So model the people who don't like your software too, and their desired payment options, as more data points from which to understand your actual best market.
Still down after 10 days, must some really messed up servers.
Screen Capture Extension for Google Chrome
You can cut diamond with diamond saws or lasers, if you wanted to pull out diamond bricks from a big mass or whatever.
Or worse - reverse it and you have if I think you're ugly, you can't have good thoughts.
I blog dax
Posterous.com is down, 503 Error
Yeah that's kind of what I'm finding with nanoc. Seems to be a large time investment at the start to understand how the whole compilation process works, and then to get the basic skeleton created for your site (or maybe it's just my stupidity?).

I'll see if I can give Stasis a try this weekend. Thanks for creating it!
The funny thing is that by optimizing the supply chain and manufacturing process, Apple has managed to significantly cut costs (or keep them high for competitors). For example, the Vaio Z is much more expensive than the latest MBA.
For a cube, what portion of its volume lies within an inscribed sphere? In other words, given a cube of edge=X and a sphere of diameter=X, what's the difference in volume?

Of course, this doesn't begin to account for the vectors, and it assumes that the density is uniform. But it should give us a sense of how much of the gravitational pull differs from our simplistic model.
Unprofitable Bazaarvoice Seeks $86.25M IPO
This is exactly the type of problem I have been encountering with my app FitLabs (www.fitlabs.co). Its an app catered to people who do Crossfit and are used to paying $150/month in gym fees. So I thought, "hmm if people are already paying that much, they wouldn't have a problem paying a premium for a tool that lets them get more out of their workouts". Wrong. I built the tool, and people balked at the price. They said I should lower it to $10/month, but even when I did that they still didn't sign up.
Well progressive taxation already redistributes money whether it's from aggregate advants of smarts or looks.
You're talking of non-economic advantages, which are not redistributed for smarts either
May I also recommend:

Learning:

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

and also

"Erlang and OTP in Action" by Martin Logan,et. al.

http://www.manning.com/logan/

Web REPL:

http://www.tryerlang.org/

Community:

http://www.planeterlang.org/

http://www.trapexit.org/
I’m sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, but the AD opportunities on Facebook SUCKerberg
from the comments

> Sad to say we only noticed this because his hosting (a Linode) went down.
Green Bay at Indianapolis NFL Preseason Online HD Video On E TV 2011 
MATCH DETAILS:
Click here to watch Green Bay at Indianapolislive

USA NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE
SEASON 2011, preseason week-3
Thursday, August 26, 2011
Time: 8:00 pm ET

venue:Lucas Oil Stadium
TVM has 9 registers, modeled after x86 registers
PC gamers who want such high specs might want to play them outside of their homes, when they go to LAN parties. This is fairly common amongst some gamers, and a portable powerhouse has some attractions for that use.
$5 laser eye surgery, $10 car
price communicates value.
I am tech-blogger and I receive a lot of mails from startups.
So, I will spell out few tips on how to pitch better.

1. You need to have a story to tell. Don't worry if its not too dramatic, but you need to add that human element.
2. Catchy Subject lines: I remember a mail which had the subject "Two 17 year olds create the first RSS based social networking site". Could never ignore that.
3. Resources: Please provide us with relevant resources like a logo, a screenshot and a press release(if any).
4. About your company: Please tell us a bit about your company, who the founders are, investments made and any
press mentions.
5. Do not spam: Do not send more than three mails asking us to feature you. That is frowned upon.
tweet/share: implemented, not launched. soon.

participate without signing up: i will take it under consideration but i find that people without identity tend to behave worse.

edit buttons: ok.

search box: maybe when searching gets better.

flagging: totally agree.
Hmmm. Strongly disagree with this.

As a hacker rather than a gamer, the concept of a programmable set of LCD keys next to the standard keyboard is extremely interesting for native app development. I hope that particular feature is copied into a subsequent Macbook Pro release.

It's really bringing the innovations pioneered by the iPhone (programmable UI rather than built-in keyboard) back to the laptop.

Among other things, you could have custom glowing save/search/email keys within Word to increase the accessibility for the average joe. They might not be able to find control-F, but they can see the key in their top 10 list.

For Mail.app, Keynote, etc. you'd have different sets of keys (show presentation, download attachments, etc.)

It could get even more interesting if different keys are available in different modes within the same app, like tooltips to the nth degree. For example, each new emacs mode could light up 10 hotkeys for useful functions associated with the mode (compile, jump to, view in browser, and so on).

tl;dr: programmable LCD keys are a very interesting way to combine the best of iPhone-style programmable UI and keyboard-style haptic feedback.
I like to think that "knowing I was handsome" gave me a lot of confidence which is what really helped me out. But I'm having a hard time convincing myself...

It's really messed up, not being able to have an objective appreciation of one's looks (even relative to the given culture.

If enough people ask if you're a model, or an actor, or mention to friends how good-looking your are I supposed theta should enough evidence that at least some people think you're good-looking. But being over-familiar with one's looks tends to make one skeptical, plus many cultures train people to not be vain, which often in practice becomes "think poorly of yourself."
That was a "~" too far for HN. It's a 19.8 mile round trip, and gas was $3.71 yesterday in Vancouver, Washington, so making the trip in your 25 mpg vehicle would cost $2.94 in gas.
It seems to me that that role is pretty well served by icons in the regular UI that the user's already looking at.
The guys that did the RSA hack would have found another attack vector even if Flash wasn't installed. Maybe they would have gone for a Java applet based attack, or perhaps in the future they'll target WebGL. The more complex your browser's capabilities are, the more surface area you have exposed to attack. Even if you reduce that surface area considerably, for example, by switching over to text only browsing for all of your employees, a motivated attacker would probably just find some way to cause a buffer overflow in the browser's text parser... Where there is a will, there is a way.