skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, I've applied #1 and also cleaned up the welcome page quite a bit. Let me know what you think!

The "what's going on now" stuff will require a little more work, and a lot more thought because I've been consciously designing the site to let users be as private as they want to be, which has had the unintended side effect of making it hard for some users to be as public as they want to be.
Though it was apparent in v3, v4 made it impossible to notice that 90+% of digg's content was 12-24 hour lagged reddit content. As this became more obvious and v4 became more mockable, this point was emphasized and mocked by reddit and digg users alike. There was cross promotion, but I don't think many redditors were "seeking out" or trying to "recruit" digg users.
Any plans to add winphone7 version now that it's mango time??
Ask HN: How do you backup your dev machine
Suppose your dev machine's hard disk crashes, how long would it take you to install everything and get your dev environment back up and running? What strategies do you use in this regard?
Tips for Maintaining Straight Hair All Day Long
I don't think there's any way to do a truly fair comparison, unless you manage to launch both apps at the same time on the same platform.

Both the iOS and Android markets have grown in the past year or so, so comparing sales at different points in time is even less valid, in my opinion.
This book is great.

This book certiantly is not a crash course. I have been working through it in my spare time since I got it a couple of years ago. I have been taking my time because I was going through school when I got it and couldn't make time for it. Now seeing this article I should pick it back up again.

I suggest though that everybody resist the urge to find the answers rather than doing them yourself. It's quite rewarding when you figure things out. There isn't one way to do it.

The only complaint I have is that when you start getting into higher functions they recommend you not use the pieces you built up for performance reasons. Personally I would like to figure these out but perhaps that should be left for a later day.
Owning one of those Alienware M15X Laptops, I can say that they are heavy and bulky. The form factor of this new laptop is a lot better, and would make a huge impact on my desire to buy it if I actually want to take it anywhere.

Hell, I about broke my back trying to lug my Alienware around a conference. I'll never do that again. I'd pay quite a bit for the ability to actually have my notebook computer be portable, and yet still able to play games.
Very useful, thank you, could you keep us updated perhaps? It would be interesting to see how this matures as your app becomes more established in the android marketplace (or if this makes any difference at all).
Someone could use an external GPU on the MBP via Thunderbolt (the Razer could too if it has an express card slot).
Thanks so much for this.

This is helpful information and something I always wanted to see side-by-side. It's also very nice to see that it seems like in some cases it is worth making an Android port, but that you, even as a Java/.NET developer by profession find it more difficult to create a quality app on Android.
While I agree with your point about starting, I think that parsing is a rather beautiful part of compiler construction by itself, with a nice theory behind it all, too.

Furthermore, if you are using Wirth style compilers, syntax-directed compilation comes rather naturally (at least to me). So I heartily second (and in fact have done so a number of times on HN) your initial recommendation for Wirth's "Compiler Construction", which is IMHO the canonical text to get somebody started. Instead of Appel's book, I find Cooper and Torczon's "Engineering a Compiler" much more comprehensive and illustrative (particularly the instruction selection and instruction scheduling parts.) Other interesting texts in the area are: Michael Scott's excellent "Programming Language Pragmatics" and Grune, Bal, Jacobs and Langendoen's "Modern Compiler Design" (both of which have a nice treatment of functional and logic programming languages [the latter one being more comprehensive])
maybe I will just buy a new matress this weekend :)
I have a few friends who did this. They were barely able to get WoW to run at the lowest settings on their MacBooks.

Able to and want to are definitely different when gaming on MacBooks.
1. Sort comments by best, not top. Always.

2. Because programming is still a pretty big subreddit, I believe it's part of the default set: unlogged users and users creating an account will get prog as part of their default subreddit subscriptions. This brings "unwarranted attention" to the subreddit until the uninterested user realizes he can unsubscribe from prog. Things are getting better there as other subreddits have taken over as the juggernauts and are being ruined instead (gaming has 660k members, pics, funny and reddit.com have 850k)
I really like the concept, but practically for MMO play it's faster to use the left-hand hotkeys or click buttons in the UI. I could see the video touchpad having a lot of awesome uses though (minimap, buffs, quest log, etc), and the buttons above the trackpad would be pretty useful for non-combat items like inventory, settings, character screen, crafting and things like that.
> it gains the attention of the general audience, who often view /r/all.

It's not that they view /r/all, it's that they have not customized their front page, so they get the default set of subreddits, which I believe is simply the subreddits with the most members.
Didn't you submit this earlier? It seems like I saw it this morning, and now I can't find it.

I don't see where comparing comes into it anywhere. It seems like you have just put up a webpage for your import business.
> It limits a person’s right to equal opportunity, reinforces the subordination of groups where unappealing characteristics, including obesity, are concentrated (ie, the poor, some ethnic minorities)

That doesn't seem to be true:

> Contrary to conventional wisdom, … the poor have never had a statistically significant higher prevalence of overweight status at any time in the last 35 years. Despite this empirical evidence, the view that the poor are less healthy in terms of excess accumulation of fat persists.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/08/the-poor-are-not-fat.h...
Amazon readies data centers for Hurricane Irene
REST Fest 2011 Video Project
JavaScript templating 6000% faster than jQuery Templates
If no sci-fi-3d-renderer makes a complete physically based rendering of this I will be surprised. Some nice Mie-scattering-atmosphere simulation with awesome distances and displacements maps from a Borg cube.. Yumm..
Here's a problem I have all the time as both a designer and a developer - When I am first building a project the dev is obviously important, fun to do, and essential to get right to use as the framework for the whole project. BUT the design is the outlet of all your vision, the face of your new baby, and something you think about in your sleep. How did you / do you stop obsessing about getting design perfect and tweaking every detail, and shift focus to development instead. I find myself pounding out dev code for a couple days till a piece is functional, then reworking the design of that feature for a week. How do you manage both, especially when you are working on an early stage and/or solo project?
Thanks for this site, I never knew Google publish analytic traffic and their estimated traffic.

Something interesting I have noticed, if you are looking at Hacker News' traffic data, there seems to be a steep decline somewhere around April [1]. I wonder what whether it is correct, and whether there was a fundamental change in this site / ycombinator around that time.

[1] https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...
Hosting Events like a Boss: Intercepting Other People's Calendars
I stopped reading Reddit at the beginning of last year: there was a clear shift in demographic that wasn't something I found to be positive. The preference had seemed to become for short, trite, flippant comments that would illicit a slew of puns. Increasingly the richness of content of submissions had dried up. Of course I was told by my friends that I should just read subreddits and ignore the garbage. But even then, the culture had changed. So ultimately it wasn't for me. Needless to say, I'm hardly a loss to Reddit's bottom-line in the scheme of things and they're probably better off in the mainstream in that regard.
Steve Jobs Through the Years: Highlights From the D Conference
While it is legal (for the time being) it is highly unregulated. Money laundering is the first thing I thought of when learned about the bitcoin, which, ironically is one of the excuses the government used to crack down on online gambling recently.
All my source code is in mercurial and subversion repositories, hosted on servers that are backed up. My Vim configuration is also online.

I can get back to work in time it takes ubuntu to get installed. There would certainly be things I would lose, but nothing I couldn't live without.

edit: I don't backup my dev machine for the above reasons.
I think it's an annual app, so the iPhone users need to rebuy it each year at the start of football season. So it seems a fair comparison.
Honestly I'm a pretty big fan of this idea. Pretty original too. This is random, but I do dig the typography.
there's more that invokedynamic could do

Definitely. As with anything, there are tradeoffs, so we'll likely hold off to see how it plays out.

Most of what I'm playing with will
go into the first Java 7 update.

Hey no fair, you have inside information. All bets are off. This is great news actually. :-)
"Minimum Viable Product" would also make for a great Culture ship name :-)

You probably know about this already but for the benefit of others I will post this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_of_the_Culture_se...
Where Can I Buy Beads
Labirent Oyunları
Building a browser sounds like a steep hill to climb. I like #2. I'm a business guy with a startup, and learning how to make money and pay for development myself was a valuable lesson to learn.
Yes, I am trying to get my post into Ask Hn. The comaprision is done through email ie you submit a product description and we send you one email with prices for that product from suppliers.
There are huge issues buying content on iTunes. Apple doesn't fix it or tell you, or help you get in touch with the developer to work around it.
Configuring Emacs as a Python IDE
In the past, I had some environment specific dependencies-- installed libraries and services-- that I couldn't easily backup and wasn't easy to set up. In this case, I would use a VM to do my development on and back up the VM image regularly.

Lately, I'm doing Rails development. Using Git, RVM and Bundler makes re-deploying my development environment a piece of cake, so I just make sure to have my source code backed up.
Yup, can simplify code for wiring together views a great deal and promote decoupling between them.
Because the iPad version is a completely different app at a different price point, so it would skew the results. If I counted iPad/in-app/ad revenue it would nearly triple the iOS numbers.
Chrome Extension Found To Be Tracking Users’ Activity
Groupon needs to pivot
Ahh.. Here you have a guy that probably can do it in realtime: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehmvVAoSf8M
GitHub for work and dev environment configuration stuff, DropBox for 1Password credentials and public stuff, Time Machine (to a Time Capsule) for my home directory (except for media and VMWare images), CrashPlan (to their hosted service) for everything save applications.

I can get running on a new computer in a couple hours; I don't have to hunt for licenses because they're in 1Password, my editor configuration is on GitHub, and the applications I use are stored safely at their vendors' sites.

Getting photos and videos back after a failure will probably take days, but that's what I'm willing to pay for, and it's better than never.
The closest to a golden rule (besides random flipping) is given early in the article and is a two-step rule:

Linda Cobb, The Queen of Clean®, recommends flipping on a seasonal schedule - side-to-side in spring and fall, and end-over-end in summer and winter.

In other words, when you flip the mattress over, alternate between flipping from the side, and flipping from the foot. This will take you through the cycle of four configurations.
I agree, the bloodbath of "Payment Declined" orders in our order inbox is downright infuriating. This is especially painful when customers email us saying that they purchase apps all the time on Android and their card didn't work only when they tried to order our games.

Agreed, this problem needs to be solved.
Ah, eustress. I remember that from high school health class!
> for building efficient polymorphic inline caches

Ah, now I understand better.
The main objective is a simple and easy email with the collected prices and data.
that may be true but I've never gotten a single customer e-mail complaint regarding this, whereas I get one nearly ever other day on android (where my sales are a small fraction of my total iOS app sales). So the problem appears to be significantly greater on android.
Interesting, what kind of marketing are you doing for the app? How are people hearing about it, just market searches?

1000+ downloads of a 2.99 app in the first couple weeks is pretty impressive, well done
So now that you know how easy it is to learn to program for webos (html / css/ js) - would the # of users it takes to make the ROI be reduced by enough such that it's ok to sell to an extremely small market?

ie. Since it's so easy to develop for, you will spend very little time/effort/money to learn to develop vs the iphone (which involves apis, objective c, etc) or vs the android (which involves java, etc) - and so it's ok that the market is small, because you can sell less copies to recoup the investment outlay (which was smaller to begin with because of the ease of development).

Does that change the value proposition of the touchpad?

If it does, then this points to a marketing failure on HP's part - they had a perfectly fine product - just needed to get past the initial "knowledge gap" when no one knows anything about the product.
The vision thing
“We are committed to demonstrating unquestionable dynamic metamorphosis by quality products and improved returns from the top down.”
“Our value proposition is to recontextualize modular capabilities to capture market share while exceeding expectations”
I agree that gaming laptops are a huge pain to carry around, but Razer's system is outrageously expensive for what you get. You could still save hundreds of dollars by purchasing a normal laptop for 300-500 to take to the office and then buy an Alienware or Clevo with a 6990M in it for about 1500-1800. If you decide to buy a desktop instead of the Alienware, you can save another 1k. If one is happy with a GT 555M's performance, you can find a 5.5 lb laptop for about 700-800 dollars which has the same card and the same CPU.
I stopped reading reddit long before you stopped. Quite a bit later, I slowly came back by being very selective about my subreddits. I think others might have done the same, because I've definitely been able to create a reddit very much like I remember it long before it got so popular. (Good god, does this post make me sound like an uber-hipster, or what!)
If I ever wrote a list of top 10 times an internet "product" handed a competitor most of it's "customers", two that would be on there include MovableType v3 (went free to paid and caused WordPress 2.0 to actually gain attention) and Digg v4.
Apple's TimeMachine. Has worked perfectly each time I needed to. Back up and running exactly where I last was, within less than 2 hours. And no manual intervention, just plug it, let it do its thing, done.
You know, it's weird. Some of my Western friends in China would be considered much more handsome than me by Western standards. Yet, Asians seem to consider me more handsome than them. Just like I sometimes consider a Chinese girl to be very pretty and yet, my Chinese friends consider her so-so [1]. The point of my story wasn't to "parade" (that would be silly on HN) but just to communicate my personal experience.

To go back to your point, the Western look definitely helps in China, regardless of beauty. Many businesses want to hire Westerners to project an international image. That being said, I think my luck had more to do with my perceived handsomeness than my Western look. I know, this doesn't sound terribly humble, but like I said, I'm not amazingly handsome by North American standards.

Also, to clarify, I'm not taking a moral/ethic position on the subject, just communicating my personal experience.

[1] http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.php?tid=707742
"I have no idea why some think it's a good idea to 'supplement' the browser's built in navigation by overriding yet more of its standard keys."

Because they can. I have yet to meet a 'web designer' or an 'user interface designer' who doesn't redesign all buttons, scrollbars and text fields for every design they do: as if the standard built-in ones aren't good enough. Or perhaps they're afraid they won't be judged as having done a good enough job on the design?

Jakob Nielsen writes about this phenomenon, and I agree with him:

"Many Flash designers introduce their own nonstandard GUI controls. How many scrollbar designs do we need? [...] The specification of a new GUI widget is a major human-factors exercise. The current Macintosh and Windows scrollbars emerged after the world's best interaction designers worked for years testing numerous design alternatives. A new scrollbar designed over the weekend is likely to get many details wrong. And, even if the new design was workable, it would still reduce a site's overall usability because users would have to figure out how it worked. They know how to operate the standard widget. When you use standards, users can focus on content and their reasons for visiting your site. Deviate, and you reduce their feeling of environmental mastery."

The disadvantage of this approach is that my apps use only the standard GUI components, which makes some people say that "they're not of this time" and that I should give the app a "fresh new look with a contemporary skin". Maybe their taste and expectations are already numbed beyond repair by the chaos in designs and visual overkill we encounter each day on the web.
Incredibly thin and light for a gaming laptop mm?
Arstechnica got paid to write that I guess.
I can fit 4 light AlienWare gaming laptops of 13" for the weight of that 17".
Even a big MBP is lighter... Odd.
I've been subscribed to only non-default subreddits for so long I didn't even notice the traffic growth, except for the occasional fail-whale. The niche parts of the site are still good.
My app is annual, in that I release a completely new app every year rather than offering free updates. So this is about as close to what you are looking for as it gets. The iOS version was released about a month earlier, but the numbers are not significantly different.
That's way too broad and general. The problems that hit entrepreneurs along the way are often things they don't know they should be learning before it's too late. By that point, the only thing you're learning from is your mistakes, and that's no way to learn if you can avoid it.
Mnmlist: the creativity of constraints
Joe Wong at RTCA Dinner - YouTube
it beat google wallet to the punch, you can send bitcoins in person via android
Why you should try attention getting publicity stunts
My app has been fairly popular on the iphone app store for over a year, and customers were demanding an android port. The only marketing I need to do at this point is just notify my existing customers that a new version is out. Everything after that is purely organic.
That's not very clear from the website. I suggest and example request and also an example reply, like what you would send back to the customer.
it was done about 2 months ago on android
iPad is pretty much identical revenue to iPhone.
Not a big deal, no need to apologize! It wasn't so much about the amount of advertising, or it being out of context. It's a persuasive article, and in addition to it feeling like a set-up for the conclusion (use, for example, my product), even without directly advertising your thesis is essentially that there's an urgent need for your product. When I read an article that's making an argument about the relative importance of something, I guess I take it with a grain of salt when the author has a clear financial stake in the reader thinking it's important too.

I appreciate that you used data and referenced other people, and again, I don't disagree with you. Your product looks cool, too. I just thought it was appropriate to let other people know in advance that this was something coming from a somewhat conflicted source.
Not sure I understand. The top 1% have little in common with the poor, especially when it comes to political interests. Due to the supreme court case, they can now spend unlimited amounts of money to try and influence politics, which means that despite their significant difference in population sizes, they are over-represented in our government.
I agree and there used to be (maybe it's still the case) problems with parser generators if you wanted to have good error recovery and reporting to the user. It's also very telling that sometimes--contrary to what people might expect--parsers pose a substantial problem in production systems: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lin...:

Law: You can't check code you can't parse. Checking code deeply requires understanding the code's semantics. The most basic requirement is that you parse it. Parsing is considered a solved problem. Unfortunately, this view is naïve, rooted in the widely believed myth that programming languages exist.
HN either doesn't use Google Analytics or didn't check the box to make their traffic numbers public. That's why the graph you link to has a dotted line, rather than a solid one. The accuracy is much less certain in their case.
Which reminds me of the statistics for Android vs. iPhone app sales.
Not until it gains significant marketshare. Supporting Android/iPad/iPhone is enough to keep me busy for now =)
Show HN : Another startup name generator
The Pursuit of Happiness - Quitting my Software Engineering Job
Sure, if there is enough interest I can do a follow up post. You may have to pester me about it on twitter or something b/c I'm not really one to put myself out there on the internet. This is my first major contribution to HN, I'm a long time lurker.
It is possible you're talking to the wrong people.

I wonder, though, how you could have designed the right app if you have only been talking to the wrong people?

I mean, the sequence is either - "design an app that you yourself want and that you think is sooo cool that the whole world will want too" or "talk to people different enough from programmers that you need to understand them first to create a great app". The first approach is (caricatured) Steve Jobs, the second approach is Patio11. But it seems if the people you're talking to hate your app, you've failed at either of these approaches.
Researchers find wide gap in immune responses of people to flu after exposure
Thanks for posting your figures! What did you do to advertise the new app on Android? I have recently ported one of my games from iOS to Android and even though it is free on Android, it is really having trouble getting traction, and this is even after sending an e-mail to 40k people and several hundred dollars in Admob advertising.

Edit: Ah, nevermind, I see you already answered this in your reply to utnick.
I'm rerunning it now with the latest rails and latest jruby and all is good.
The only things I see Flash being useful for these days are video in older browsers and copying text to the clipboard via a button.

Sure, there are Flash games and ads, but I think Unity is a much better game development plugin and many people block Flash ads these days.