skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They make it that annoying so you'll pay for a premium account that removes all the annoying crap (and improves speed, removes download caps).

And anyway, they provide a valuable service: illegal file sharing using only Google and HTTP. I've long since abandoned networks like gnutella, edonkey, bittorrent, etc in favor of a good blog search engine and file-downloading sites. Similarly there's hundreds of streaming video sites to watch TV series on without the need to download. I can ignore an ad here or there for the convenience of pirating media from any web browser in the world.
PHD Comics Movie is coming, providing an inside view of science
If you don't have Silverlight, this stream should work: http://mfile.akamai.com/125013/live/reflector:52976.asx
I don't think media queries offer you that functionality, and I can't think of a way to do it within JavaScript. How would you do it?
I like the concept, but there needs to be some validation check (I clicked on Preview Map without entering any details and got a "NOT FOUND" message in a popup -- using chrome).

I didn't want to register, just wanted to see what you were doing, but how are you creating the URL to pass around? Are you having an "owner" of the group? How do you plan on doing a search?

I'd be interested in helping out (evanos at yahoo).

Good luck!
HTC has a whole pile of recycling programs in different locations here are a few examples:

http://www.htcinc.net/news.cfm?id=56

http://htcpedia.com/news/htc-goes-green-and-lets-you-trade-u...

They will even give you a rebate on HTC phones in some locations if you turn in any old phone. That's not a proper recycling program because it requires the phone to boot, but it does take a lot of old phones out of circulation.

HTC should probably add a recycling section to their main website, the international nature of their website probably makes that problematic because they chose to have all these little local programs rather than one big universal one.
Khan Academy has a complete Linear Algebra section: http://www.khanacademy.org/#linear-algebra
Have a look at the nomograph in this paper: http://eetd.lbl.gov/ie/pdf/LBNL-1519E.pdf

The anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001 brought to light a number of uncertainties about how to tell whether a building is clean enough to re-occupy (How effective is sampling? What's the anthrax dose-response curve look like? What's the distribution of spores in a building?, etc.).

As part of his investigation, a colleague of mine constructed the nomograph in this paper, to illustrate the tradeoffs involved. By presenting the uncertainties graphically, the nomograph helps visualize the tradespace, in a way that simply running multiple numerical calculations won't necessarily do.

By the way, this also shows that these are not an entirely lost art.
haha, morning mind and fat fingers.
Not is back, post deleted
A lot of programmers are unsung and don't get the praise they deserve. Sure, you have famous programmers like Woz and Zuckerberg, but there are a lot of talented people out there that aren't even given praise at work.
Sorry, my email is in my profile now.
You think LD is going to affect the public's perception of Flash more than say Farmville et al? What?
茶叶加盟
I know his first name is the offending name. I doubt his credit card only says "Peter" on it.
CoffeeScript FTW. https://gist.github.com/1214296
I wish this wouldnt need a chrome extension, but otherwise its pretty sweet!
What part of the browser did you find unusable? I am running mango developer build and it runs damn fast. As good as safari on my iphone.
Target's website crashes
Hi jnorthrop,

Thanks for your reply.

Currently my users are people with blogs & websites. My target market has to be web apps in the future. So people can put in "need help? email us" button. And as this button floats to the bottom right, its sort of a "feedback" button. I know that there are a lot of chat scripts which default to email when you're not online. But, its hard being online all the time for single founders and using a chat script to default to email is not worth the money.

The web is growing any way and more users need a simple solution for a contact form.
Popcorn News: living social information video
The difference between appliances and tools we physically use and programming tools is that the abstraction for physical tools is necessarily as simple as possible. Cars being one of the most complex tools we interact with, it still has a very basic and well defined set of abstractions to learn.

Software tools on the other hand have a way of spiraling in complexity. We're so good at using physical tools because this simplicity allows us to learn their use on an unconscious level, ie. muscle memory. The take home here is that we need to radically simplify the programmming tools we use. Unfortunately the trend towards frameworks rather than libraries is moving in the wrong direction.
It seems like clock speed is no longer the race in the cpu world, though correct me if im wrong.
I'm a Linux SysAdmin in Sunnyvale, clients are all over. I don't do a lot of consulting, maybe one day a month or so, give or take. But I usually charge around $100/hr. I've gone as high as $200 and as low as $80 in recent times, but $100 is usually the target. Of course, my prices float based on how much I want the work; If prgmr.com just handed out a big credit and/or I'm drooling over some new hardware, you can often get a deal; when the cashflow on my VPSs is good, on the other hand, not so much. Last time I did full-time contracting through a body shop I got $72/hr, but this was several years back, and I've published a book since then.

I'm looking to have my company do more consulting as a way to raise short-term revenue, and as a way provide my employee(s) a way to do higher value work (and thus earn more money) without leaving my company for more profitable employers.

Ideally, I'd personally do about one day a week of contracting like this, and as employees become more experienced, slowly transition them from support to consulting.

As far as I can tell, rates depend as much on the client as on your skill level. I've had some clients laugh at my rate and offer /more/ - while others do the opposite.

I'm considering retainer type deals, and I'd be interested to hear how retainers have worked for other people.

edit: attempted a less-objectifying reword.
I'm an avid Toggl user, and I've never used the project notes before, nor have I felt pressured to by the interface. The notes feature is completely unobtrusive. It takes a few clicks to get to it.
Census Bureau says record 46.2M live in poverty
Thx, I'll fix that. You can fill out the form and click preview without saving anything. This just shows you the route we think you take to the office.

The person who creates the group is the admin. Once you (the admin) create the group you will get a link via e-mail that you can send around the office, so that you co-workers can join. I should really make that clear to people. It is funny how I developed the app but need outside eyes to tell me things like this.. I'll get both those things fixed.
If you lack the common sense to realize that in order to sell something people need to be willing to buy it, then all the startup wisdom in the world won't help you.
I know this is cliched, but it /should/ just work. It should be easy enough for the end user to have a basic understanding of that tool.
Ask HN: I've launched, users have dried up, what's wrong? (repodrop.com)
I've recently launched RepoDrop - Private Git Repository Hosting. I'm an experienced developer, but marketing is a whole new ball game.

I got my initial interest through blog posts, had some beta signups and emailed them at launch. About 10% signed up, not bad I thought.

However, since then there have been virtually no new signups, I thought the site was broken at one point! I've tried some targeted Google Adwords and Facebook Ads that have generated clicks but no signups (even though it is free to sign up with no commitment).

I think this is a common slump to end up in for techies-turned-entrepreneurs but like many before me I was blinded and thought it would be fine for me.

This is the product url: https://repodrop.com/

Can you see anything obviously wrong with the product, homepage, signup, features, copy etc..? Do you have any advice what I can do to get some interest? Have I completely misjudged the market?

Admittedly it is a MVP at the moment and I plan to iterate on the product, but people aren't even finding out that it is an MVP at this stage and I don't have enough users to gather enough opinion on the required future feature set.

Thanks.
Microsoft Reimagines Windows, Presents Windows 8 Developer Preview
«While the fact that a record number of Americans are living in poverty should not surprise anyone at this point,»

Record number or record percent? It's an incredibly significant distinction.
Why the hell in every Microsoft's website, video is always automatically loaded and played without the user intent to watch!!it's such a stupid thing
Very interesting. Where is your data coming from?
If you're referring to GWT, you're absolutely right, but thats more Google's stake than Java's.
Also could keep in mind the loss in revenue to your company if you were to cut that feature. If the 5% users is paying all of your bills, then you need to be careful.
I must say... I like this.
This is an okay list of benefits of a subscription product, but the line "As long as churn stays low, you’re almost never going to see your income disappear overnight. With a native app, if people stop buying, you stop seeing income." left me wanting a bit more.

Keeping churn rates down is critical to success with subscription-based products, along with keeping customer acquisition costs low, so I'd be much more interested in hearing about strategies / innovations in those areas.
There is no legal basis for kicking Greece out of the euro. None of the relevant treaties have any provision for member states kicking another state out of the monetary union or a member state leaving of their own accord. I think there is a provision for a state to leave the EU, but only of its own accord and not by force, and they'd have to leave the EU not just the monetary union. So if its going to be legal, there'd have to be some amendments made to the treaties.

Of course, Greece could just turn its back on the treaties, ditch the euro, re-instate the drachma, convert all debt obligations to drachmas and go on its merry way devaluing the drachma against the euro. But they would no doubt face retaliation from an angry EU and will likely get hit with stiff trade barriers on Greece exports as punishment (in which case devaluing the drachma would have limited effect).

I think the more likely outcome will be some kind of debt restructuring, a situation where the foreign bondholders (who own almost 60% of the debt) will have to finally face up to their losses.
FYI your stylesheet is being served with html at the end (an error page) which is causing it to fail.
webOS still has no developers, which is the reason they did not make it.

WTF! As a webOS developer I'll be damned if someone says that the developers were the reason the platform didn't thrive. Between the official channels and preware there was plenty of development going on. Probably not in iOS or Android numbers. Here it is: Palm transitioned from Mojo to Enyo. Developers are writing applications in Enyo since that is where the future of the platform lies. The only device that used Enyo was the Touchpad. Once Apotheker shitcanned that product a lot of webOS developers were left holding the bag.

Samsung would have to build support on it, make it really cool and attractive for developers.

They would have to do no such thing. Steady improvements and a real commitment is all we ask. The platform is good on its own but if it has no rudder the community isn't going to steer it for you.

They added an App Store late and it never really took off

This will come as surprise to a lot of v1 Sprint Pre owners. "Hey what's this icon do? It says App Catalog but that can't be right because according to this blog they haven't created it yet. Must be some sort of trick!"

As a mobile developer I've put my project on the shelf because I don't know what HP is going to do with it and there are so many other mobile platforms that are still kicking. Under the current CEO I have no confidence that webOS is going to survive in any useful form.
It's a live feed, not a Youtube video.
This site is awesome....Im not sure its actually giving recommendations it seems just like the similar links from youtube but great idea
sweet! serendipitously just what i need this week picking insurance and all the information more quickly and better organized than sites like ehealthinsurance.com et al.
wants:

- side-by-side comparison (check several, show all)

- easy print-out of plans and side-by-sides, or PDF-gen

- tool-tips for filters at left. nice tool-tips on terms in rows already

- filter by deductible, co-pay, premium amnts (eg <$500)?
So, it's not "Windows Tablet 8", or "Windows Mobile 8", just "Windows 8"? Does this mean this is also going to be the desktop OS?
Clickable: https://repodrop.com/
Interesting to find Opa (http://opalang.org), a web dev language in this article.

Any HN user tried this? Would love to know your comments.
Numerical Linear Algebra by Trefethen and Bao is well regarded.
Considering the poverty bar is always moving, I don't know if you can get an accurate impression either way.
Very nice! Your sorting by deductible doesn't work correctly.
For starters you could redesign your home page. Its very confusing in my opinion. The product features is in the footer, also the screenshot is not clear. No offense, this is not the design, I'd trust to open my wallet. :)
These could be really useful to include in spec sheets for various solid state electronics components. They always include graphs of current and voltage characteristics, but perhaps including a nomogram instead (or as well) could help people understand the properties of the component.

They also could be really helpful to teach graphic learners about how certain relationships work -- I am certain I would have understood many concepts much faster with one of these -- particularly in physics.
The Great Correlation vs Causation Debate
I too feel it's worthless to simply 'boot up' with those frequencies. The whole point is to do _something_ with all that speed, like benchmarking, gaming, folding performance...
With a few more features, that could be a great alternative to campfire.
Agreed, I take the same approach. The world is not black/white, hacks/optimal. There is a balancing act to be had, including balancing time spent against future issues from that solution.
I've worked on 2 week retainers initially. It's worth while with small and larger clients alike. It adds a air of security and relationship trust between you the client. Make it know upfront you work on a retainer though, obviously not after the fact. Individual clients not so much. Somewhat unrelated, but relative is a talk by Mike_FTW on payments --freelancing http://vimeo.com/22053820
GitHub Down : 404 Not Found
Yes, it's one OS for all Windows devices.
I really like it. I had to buy health insurance not too long ago, and I used one of the incumbent online services. The experience wasn't all that bad, but your site beats them in the first step of refining carriers/plans to see which ones I should consider. It also feels a lot more transparent.

Also, I really like that it's fast. Don't lose that part. :-)
I remember taking linear algebra some time ago. I tweeted my one main takeaway from the class. http://goo.gl/gEu4y
Nomographs are often used in airplane manuals. When your power plant dies, you still want to be able to calculate your range based on speed, altitude etc.
Ok, so Hefferon was my textbook for 2 full semesters. Lots of problems with this book. Hefferon is an algebraist, so the computational aspect of linear algebra ie. the stuff you are most likely to use linalg for at your workplace, has been given short shrift. Instead, the author gives fullblown treatment to theorem proving in vector spaces. So you are spending a lot of time constructing isomorphisms between subspaces....that shit is neat for a math major, which I was, but now that I'm in the workplace, I find what the world calls "linear algebra" isn't what Hefferon cares about.

eg. One of the basics you must absolutely know, or so I've been told, is how to do a PCA, and why a PCA is not the same as regression. So if you've got multidimensional data, say data in 7 dimensions ( risk ratio, fico score, salary, age etc etc ), you want to know if you can reduce that whole set to say 1 dimension. ie. can you transform the original set of 7 variable vectors into a much smaller set of 1 variable vectors that captures 90% of the information in the original ? If so, how ? Turns out you construct a linear combination of correlated variables. Ok, but there's infinitely many combinations. So how ? Well, construct it in such a fashion that the variance of the combination is maximized. That component is called the Principal Component, and its the single most used technique to reduce dimensionality in the industry. So you've taken a 7-dimension space and nicely reduced it to a 1-dimension subspace with maximum variance that explains 90% of the original 7 dimension space. Its quite amazing actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis

Similarly, there are a whole bunch of very common stuff you'd actually use linear algebra for in CG - translation, rotation in 3D, shear matrices and the like. Hefferon doesn't do those either.

In portfolio theory which is my bread and butter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portfolio_theory ) almost everything I do is very properly linear algebra. But again, Hefferon doesn't offer any insight into how/why finding a vector with minimum variance can yield better returns in a vector space of portfolios.
Great site, I especially like the explanations for the different terms.

How did you get all the insurance rates and terms, just from the companies' sites?

When I tried evaluating the health care plans my company offered me a few month ago I had a terribly hard time getting information about the different plans that are out there. (But then again, I'm not from the US and the whole health care system keeps confusing me.)
Two things seem odd about this:

1. It was an automated script from Warner Bros responsible for the abuse of the taketown tool and filing requests for content they don't hold the copyright to.

2. The taketown tool built by Hotfile doesn't require any sort of manual review from any human before the file is taken down.

edit: by "odd" I mean "unexpected"
Verizon improves search in its app store
Where did you read that? The article would seem to imply it was an eight-core chip they were working with.
Is it zombieware?
As someone who worked for MSFT for so long, this bit really makes me happy - mostly since no one would have given this much odds of happening.

"With the introduction of OS X Lion, Apple gave us a glimpse at what a post-PC operating system might look like, and now Microsoft's gone and pushed that idea to the limit. If Cupertino's latest was a tease, than Windows 8 is full frontal. And we have to admit, we like what we see. "
One minute after posting time, it's up for me.
Total numbers. It's the highest rate in two decades. "The poverty rate in 2010 was the highest since 1993 but was 7.3 percentage points lower than the poverty rate in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available. Since 2007, the poverty rate has increased by 2.6 percentage points."

Source: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_weal...

There's a graph showing both numbers at http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/13/7742437-pov...
I think nomagraphs could be very useful in realtime dashboards, where one needs to convey several interrelated values and their relationships simultaneously. Moreover, many engineers prefer nomographs because they're actually faster and more intuitive than trying to solve a problem with a computer. That's why they teach you how to use psychrometric charts in thermodynamics and Smith charts in antenna design (or at least I was taught both ~8 years ago).
yeah, of course it is, but same is the case with many of other Microsoft related websites.
In fact, I will try to put up a list.
re:

> I'm looking to start renting out my apprentice for around $50/hr, and pushing my own consulting.

and

> (as my current one is clearly at least 'journeyman' level at this point, and as such will likely leave me soon.)

Maybe your apprentice would be willing to stick around if you didn't think about them as someone you can 'rent out for around $50/hr'.
I don't get it, why not shut turn off the phone? Why keep it turned on all night? I've never had an Android (nor iPhone), but on my S60 I just set the alarm and turn it off. Checking the emails before sleeping would require turning it on, inputting the PIN, connecting, etc.
This recent discussion in Disrupt talks about the same issue: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/max-levchin-and-peter-thiel...

I think the low barriers to entry leads to so many social games, the next check-in app, trivial notification apps, deal aggregators, etc. Everyone thinks they can start a business these days, but in actuality, you really need domain expertise to start a successful one.

I do concede if we don't have the ability to tackle on these problems, and if the alternative is a 9-5, then maybe creating the next social game isn't such a bad idea.
Adding some depth to the pitch might help. It appears on first glance to be one page - try showing users how complete and useful the service is with more screenshots and examples of use. Since security is a primary value prop it would be nice to know more about how the site is more secure than github.
Thanx for taking the time to give some background. I posted the anecdote on the Clojure list just by way of sharing some of the progress we were making with Clojure. If someone had actually asked me, I'd have probably said "No, don't post this on HN" because it's an isolated anecdote - not a general case.

A couple of folks have picked on the "Clojure code follows the Scala code" claim. Since the code embodies a fair bit of proprietary business logic, I can't share it - which is a shame because it would clearly show the structure really is very similar with almost all of the same function names.

I'll see if I can find some time to sit down with the two code bases side by side and produce a more detailed comparison which would answer some of the more critical voices here.

A couple of folks mentioned library support and part of the increased conciseness in the Clojure probably comes from that - in particular, in Clojure, a SQL query result is a sequence of maps whereas I had to construct a collection wrapper around ResultSet in Scala (remember, the code was written back 2009 - there are better SQL abstractions available for Scala now as third party libraries).

Using parallel collections in Scala would more closely mirror the approach we now use in Clojure - and that would shrink the Scala code a bit - but parallel collections weren't available when the code was written. However, using agents in Clojure - which would more closely mirror the old Scala code - would only add a few lines.

I think the Scala code could be made quite a bit more concise because of the advances in Scala over the last two years. I suspect I could make the Clojure code a little bit more concise too. I don't believe I could make the Scala code more concise than the Clojure code.