skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hacking Google ad-words
Ok, so this is just passed the theory stage, but I thought I would see what others are thinking.

Within Google Ad-words, you can set a Max-CPC, and then google gives you a very precise estimated rank. I am wondering if anyone is willing to own up to using this to find out how much a competitor is willing to spend to get the top spot.
Not at night it isn't. High costs for storage mean that photovoltaic solar will need to be complemented by other sources for a good while yet.
Blackbuntu, penetration testing distribution
I definitely understand where you are coming from (and I didn't downvote you), but I have to disagree.

That employee (we'll call her Sarah) isn't being paid to see how a startup is created; she's paying to see how a startup is created.

She's paying heavily. She's losing money in the form of a lower salary compared to equivalent jobs, and she's losing money in the form of losing free-time compared to equivalent jobs.

Sometimes, that payment is very worth it. But it's a payment.
I think I'd rather see more innovative ways of representing the history of a sporting event graphically instead of trying to replicate the relatively inane blow-by-blow that you currently get from real sports journalists.

Maybe though if this kind of thing continues to improve the humans will have to start doing more serious analysis instead of fluff coverage.
The two contracts I spent the most time going back and forth with before signing were the two biggest wastes of my time. One was a ridiculous NDA with a paranoid guy with delusions that he had the world's best original idea which turned out to be worthless and obvious. The other was a decent gig but they tanked and ran out of cash before I ever got paid. It didn't matter how tight the contract was when there's no money there.
The lack of a proper full screen mode really kills this game for me, I end up click outside of the window and inadvertently switching to a different application.
Chrome Extension is here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojaeikpecldleicicn...
"At least with WebGL you have multiple groups working on solving the major issues."

I'm not sure this falls under the "advantage" column in this scenario. Number of "groups" doesn't count for anywhere near as much as "number of people", and there's no particular reason Adobe can't field as many people on their one side as the other interested groups can in total, unless one of those groups really commits. Having a lot of big names on the list doesn't guarantee than any given name has more than "a guy we told to subscribe to the mailing list and scream if somebody proposes something that doesn't serve our interests". (That's by way of example. I know there is non-zero real commitment, my point is that it isn't at all the case that this group must outweight Adobe's ability to solve the problem.)
You'd think that right? But I left Microsoft in spring of 2010.
I've always thought this was something of a joke. An iPhone doesn't have 1 button. It has a power button, two volume buttons, and a home button. Personally I think the 'home' button on the iPhone is unintuitive and confusing and would be glad if Apple did away with it.
Weird, I never got it, and I'm on Docs daily. Guess I'm just an outlier. Thanks for setting me straight.
When people refer to html5 they are often including css3 within those technologies, html5 has by most people agreed to be a marketing term that just means the recent wave of web tech, html itself is now versionless

http://slides.html5rocks.com/#landing-slide

is probably the best overview of the new "html5" features, my personal favourites would probably be localStorage, websockets and webgl, along with a lot of the css3 features
Steve Jobs was referring to plywood as an inferior material used not for any advantage except cost and ease of installation. His point was that if you care about quality in an all-encompassing way, not just as a means to an end, you're going to care about the quality of things that your customers will rarely or never see.
Bartz resigns from Yahoo board
I'm coming from Montreal, anybody else driving? I'm willing to car share if you're driving.
There is a big difference between "I think it will work" and "it works!".
You're honestly suggesting we abandon one of the most promising sources of fuel in history because you're afraid someone might be able to weaponize it?

I got news for ya bud. There's weapons everywhere, and governments have the resources to make them, thorium reactor or not. Extremists have the drive to source them, thorium or not. Hell, Brevik proved that. Should we ban fertilizer too?
Or, pinch, which zooms out so you see all six at once.

So, just two actions (pinch + pick screen)- and, it's instantaneous. Very nice.
Afaik 2 machines are almost mandatory
1. Dev machine
2. Email machine

The 2 biggest orgs inside MS are Office and Windows, devs in both of them can't have a single machine doing both the above tasks. (And VMs suck for disk based I/O, and that becomes a factor when you have multi-hour build time)
Maciej, why do you write as if Mozilla doesn't ask for (not "insist" on) things with Google and fail to prevail? We do that all the time. Some in Mozilla are still waiting for the good thing to happen.

In VP8's case, what alternative do we have that isn't OS-dependent? We can't afford the gangster fee.
America fuck yeah! Literacy is for faggots!
bankruptcy (at least here in England) means you're royally fucked, especially at 22.
I think his dad is a good advisor.

The reason he was hard to sue is that he's so small. If things went really South on a small project, what's the worst thing that happens? He's 22 and talented in New York - he declares bankruptcy, and gets another job or stays on Dad's couch. This is a situational thing - you can accept liability when the downside is so low. This is why legal departments in small firms are much gentler than legal departments in the Fortune 500. Of course this doesn't work for a large firm, or someone with 3 kids and a mortgage. His dad would have said, "Go get a real job" or something like that.

Similar on the hiring - when you're that small, you invite someone to take the risk for you. You can take more risk when there's limited downside. And in this case it was the other guy's downside - if there was no work, he'd be the one in trouble.
Unfair comparison. Ethernet and TCP have checksums and can retry failed transmissions, so you could have a cheap, crappy cable and you wouldn't know except for a slower transfer rate.
Sorry, somehow this comment is on the wrong parent.
Bartz Resigns From Yahoo’s Board
In the U.S. it depends somewhat; if you have a place to rent (e.g. know your landlord or it's via a friend) it's not a huge deal. You won't get a mortgage, and it'll make getting new credit cards or rentals from strangers harder, but not life-ending. Especially if you have a glamorous story behind it, like going bankrupt due to your tech startup being sued into oblivion...
The priority-based process scheduler says "Hi."

Like being able to run multiple things on your computer without having the less-important tasks block more important tasks? Thank the Apollo computers.
Wear Lingerie and Spice up Your Love Life
Every woman should own a lingerie or two whether she’s married or single. Lingerie has a magical way of making a woman feel she’s a goddess, helping her unleash the real woman within. This sexy piece of adult dress should be considered an essential wear wherever a woman may be. But more especially during intimate moments when she has to slip into something sexy which surely can make couples spend longer time in the bedroom together.
They're probably rounding up from the chinese lunar calendar, which is on 4xxx something now. I don't know what's the basis for year zero for that though.
the paper is at http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41756/22623331...
What makes you think that in "a week or two" you are able to cut costs by a factor of ten without sacrificing performance and reliability?
The home button is perfectly straightforward to use, as explained in this chart: http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/adurdin/4944720731/
Gel Lets Doctors Fix Ruptured Blood Vessels without Sutures
Coach Sneakers Jenney CSK-018
Amazon in talks to launch digital book library: WSJ
I'm not surprised at all. It's (or was) running on a small VPS with prgmr.com and was supposed to work for the demo and that's it. And it was pretty slow for just me already.

As I said, the code is very inefficient, so small server+code slapped together+TechCrunch is not good.

And you wouldn't need to be in SF to see something. It's supposed to work anywhere.
Seems weak and confused. There are some good arguments to be had around readability, writability and when to focus on what.

Those are not here.
GPS Receivers Now Small Enough to Attach to Almost Anything
Congrats on constructing the perfect troll for this community!
Just imagine if the average American spent as much on space as they do on their car.
Embracing Complexity
Anatomy of a startup
TLDR: "All these hippies are doing things that don't benefit me! I don't want a new programming language! Whine!"

The part of CoffeeScript hate I find most amusing is all the hate for the fact that it's a language that compiles to JavaScript. "The code it generates is bad!" "It's a leaky abstraction!" Well guess what guys, the C compiler that pretty much every piece of code running on your system went through does exactly the same thing, only it generates assembly. Since you don't know assembly (or anything other than how to animate ads with jQuery), you aren't complaining. But it's the same principle and it works well enough. C doesn't expose all of assembly's features. C doesn't always generated optimal assembly code. And yet, we use it anyway, because it's just so much nicer than the "real" underlying language. (And of course, x86 assembly is not what x86 processors run anymore. But that translation takes place in silicon, so you see even less complaining.)

Complain about actual problems, not about what you can see. If all you talk about is the obvious, you look stupid.
Robots argue about God during first conversation
A lot of the alleged NASA spinoffs are vastly overrated or incorrectly attributed to NASA. Overall the spinoff benefits do not justify the enormous cost of, especially, NASA manned spaceflight and thus aren't a good argument for its continued existence. Trying to justify hundreds of billions of dollars in expenses with hand-held vacuum cleaners and better golf balls is patently ridiculous.

The only good argument is the direct one: it's something we want to do and something we should do for its own reasons and merits. Personally I believe that to be the strongest argument and also a perfectly adequate argument.
"Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
Why would a coder ever be held responsible for something not specified in the requirements doc? If people wanted Y2K compliant software in the 70s and 80s they should have specified it.

As for multibillion dollar valuations, what's wrong with the valuations on MSFT, AAPL, GOOG? If you think the PE is crazy on LNKD, just short it. As for what VCs are willing to invest for particular companies those investments are more anecdotes than data.
Forth & stack machines
What Acne Products to Choose?
I'm sure you made your 12-year old brother giggle a little when you came up with that one. Well done. Isn't this past your bed-time?
Comodo Hacker, TurkGuvenligi … out for lulz or breaking the internet?
I agree with the sentiment of this point in general I think. Having counsel read every single contract and letting them wrestle directly with clients is probably a bad idea. Your lawyer will have only your interests in mind (or theirs, who knows?), and it probably won't lead to much productive happening. And even further, taking a few business law classes would be cheaper than using up tons of lawyer hours and probably net a better end result.

Anecdotally, At Arcturo, both myself and one of my principal guys have a good bit of contract reading experience (he much much more than myself). Every time I get a contract, I toss it to him and let him give me a thumbs up/down/comment. Having him around to handle reading things over and nit picking (often times to the point of having their lawyers concede points to us they hadn't addressed or thought of) has been awesome. If you can find someone who has a lot of business operations experience and can also hack code, they'll add a LOT of value to your company.
I love and use CoffeeScript because it removes almost all of JavaScript's cruft, making the true purpose of the code much clearer. Ultimately, removing cruft is all CoffeeScript does—it doesn't fundamentally change JavaScript—but man does it do it well.

That being said, CoffeeScript has bugs[1]. I've run into its bugs before, and there are few things more frustrating than dealing with bugs in your language.

[1]: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues?labels=bug...
Mobile Homes for Sale in Georgia
Agreed. It really sounds like the author doesn't want to like CoffeScript for reasons along the lines of "CoffeeScript is just some hipster code for people that like the idea of being great programmers"
I took something different from this article, which was that if you wait to do business until you have a sure thing, then you are waiting too long. Take advantage of opportunities, and figure out the details on thew way.
Ask HN: Is there an App Builder that doesn't Suck?
I surveyed a bunch of them, AppMakr, Genwi, but all they seem good for was creating just "one" kind of app, that's a simple RSS feed-reader. Is there something better out there, like Weebly is for Websites ? Or there is no demand for an appbuilder ?
Sleep (or how to hack your brain)
One Little Customization to One Mans Bash Prompt...
Home Improvement Solutions, 5 Major Steps to Solve Your Problem
If you read the whole article the author is actually not saying that he agrees with those complaints. And yes as an Electrical Engineer I can write assembly code.
I like the idea of CoffeeScript. But so far, for me, it's just not better enough for me to use it over plain JavaScript. The reason I use C over assembly is b/c there is such a HUGE difference. If C were only marginally better I wouldn't bother with it either.
The near-universal stance has been that monopolies are a natural byproduct of the free market, and not a "problem".

There's a large subset (possibly the majority?) of libertarians who expect that monopolies are a byproduct of state intervention, and not a natural product of the free market, which is precisely why one shouldn't interfere in ways that lead to monopolies (among other ways).

Are there examples of monopolies which didn't have state support?
It'll make them more cost effective. Making them cheaper won't improve their ability to produce power on demand though. That's necessary to replace base load power stations, and neither solar nor wind are capable of it yet.
I wrote the user-interface for my iPad app in JS (using PhoneGap) initially. Working on a large pure JS UI project sure makes you realize the shortcomings of JS, both fundamental and syntactic. It took a week to convert the JS to CS by hand and I did it hoping that the one-time effort would pay itself off over the next few months of development. Within just 2 weeks after the conversion, I started cranking out more features than I had in months before, and surprisingly with very little new code being written.

CS enabled me to write cleaner, simpler code in 5 lines instead of 30 lines in JS. While I don't care about the LOC as a metric of performance, I do have a limited short-term memory and can't remember the intricate workings of a class I wrote 2 months ago. Being able to recollect how a class functions is significantly easier if you have to read 50 LOC instead of 300.

I don't understand why people worry about being pro or against a language or a variant. Before CS, I managed to write decent JS that made me productive. With CS, I write better code and am more productive. Hence I continue to use CS. YMMV.

Also it's amusing to see this was posted to HN by jashkenas himself.
Unless you're renting an apartment in Austin.
And here I thought everyone might have had their fill of this kind of thing after the whole "upskirt" kerfuffle from earlier this year.
Well written, though a tad [ok, way too] long. Having had TJ reject a Coffeescript related pull request of mine on a project of his I have experienced his and the Learnboost teams distaste for Coffeescript.

My problem with CS is the way it is taught and demonstrated, with every example trying to outdo the last in how much syntax they can leave out. It makes the code "pretty" but unnecessarily complicated. Otherwise I am a fan of reduced boilerplate, comprehensions and the like. Just don't expect me to remove () just because I can.
Right, but there aren't enough people in the world that can critically analyze the output of a C compiler to start an Internet meme that "C is evil".
40 year old 3D computer graphics
This is not entirely true. If solar were super cheap and battery technology were also super cheap and significantly improved from what we have today then distributed solar power (on rooftops, for example) could be feasible. But that's a lot of ifs.
I think the name is referenced in the README, but for fullness sake-

Originally it was to be called the twitterator, because I'm not great at naming things. Evidently twitter won't let you have twitter in the name, so I changed it to twatterator.. which is a noun, not a verb. Logical verb is twat.
That's a very attractive site, and I really find the icons attractive, too (though I imagine they'll be unhelpful for people with difficulty discerning colors).

I thought I'd let you know that you have "DEBUG = True in your Django settings file"[1], which reveals your various routes. This might be unintentional.

[1]: http://www.parti.cl/icon/your-site/code/users-name
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2985137
At least it's not an incredibly long and rambling "one third finished" (!!) essay in favor of more terseness. Because that would be ridiculous.
Don't ask for introductions to investors
It's funny. If storage costs drop then everything improves. Hydro would become amazingly useful cause you could run the dam all the time and store the energy in batteries. The biggest problem with power generation is the fluctuation of starting and stopping the plants. Solar would not be a sole beneficiary.
"self-levitating hamster"

That's hilarious! I'm seriously fighting my social-urge to upvote...
I am wholeheartedly convinced that you asked privately. It might have made a difference if Mozilla had publicly asked for an open standards commitment. As things stand, Google got PR cover for a power grab. I also think it was a reasonable choice for Mozilla to sign onto VP8 anyway, given the lack of better alternatives for you. However, I think VP8 is still a better example of the phenomenon of Google's increasing promotion of purely Google-controlled technologies than WebSQL is.

The video codec situation is really quite sad. There is no technology option that is all of an open standard, RF licensed and sufficient quality. Vendors all have to make their choices out of the imperfect options we have.
Poorly written and quite long winded. By the time the author arrives at his second argument he's lost steam.
Microsoft aside, Standard Oil, Kodak, AT&T, and, well, AT&T-2, off the top of my head. These are/were "smaller companies"?

Antitrust claims get tacked on to a lot of lawsuits by overzealous attorneys, but they're usually dismissed out of hand. Serious antitrust litigation is rare, and by definition targets companies that are large in their particular industries.
His party argues that file sharing is a fundamental civil right that our ancestors "fought, bled and died to give us, their children and grandchildren". Yet they only propose to legalize non-commercial file sharing.

If it is a civil right, then why shouldn't file sharers be able to do it commercially?

He (and other Pirate Parties) dodge every attempt I've seen to get an answer to the simple question of how things would work with their proposed changes in effect. A movie or major video game costs tens of millions of dollars to produce. If essentially all file sharing is completely legalized, I want to know who will finance the making of movies and video games.

All they'll ever say is "Oh, they'll find some other way to pay for it". That's not good enough. I want some concrete suggestions. I tried asking him this question on his Reddit AMA. Here's the question and his answer: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k7jkq/i_am_rick_falkvi....
thanks for the ideas. I appreciate your comment
Amazon reportedly in talks to launch a Netflix for books
Point taken sir, point taken.
At one point, the author writes:

> OK im done ranting at invisible Brendan Eich now (as if hes going to read this) :-)

Write a more cogent piece, and he will. I'm amazed at how generous Brendan is with his time. He responds to tweets, and to numerous comments on his blog. When I asked him to look over the part of my CoffeeScript book that deals with the history of JavaScript, he not only did so, he also offered technical corrections and suggestions pertaining to other parts of the book. Just today, he took to HN to participate in a vigorous discussion of Google's forthcoming Dart language: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982256

In short: Rather than using the creator of JavaScript as a strawman in a meandering diatribe (one that's 3,700 words long and yet "only 1/3 done"), you should try to organize your thoughts and engage with him.
CURE HEMROID-Chinese and Oriental Cures
You can store energy in a dam. Pump it up during the day, run it through the turbines at night. Probably not too efficient but lack of storage is not a convincing reason for giving up on renewables, IMO.
With the tablet including prime and a discount (or included) version of this service, it could bring in another population to the tablet form factor. I'm thinking those that only have a Kindle now. The Kindle brand could continue to grow.
Articles like this depress me, because in 1998, I totally knew how to make websites, but didn't know I could make money doing it. Instead I was 18 and doing what I was supposed to do, that is I was busy going to school, and now I'm 31 and still in school not making money. What's wrong with me? Sigh.
Fall 2011 hair trends
hot fall hair trends for 2011.
> it doesn't fundamentally change JavaScript—but man does it do it well.

I guess it really depends on our definition of fundamental. Certainly, it doesn't turn JS into Lisp. But it does introduce concepts that while possible in JS, are not nearly as easy and transparent to use. E.g. the 'do' keyword. When I write CS, I think using 'do' and not "let me insert a closure here to ensure variable values aren't overwritten in the loop." Same with comprehension, function binding (=>), and classes in CS.

Syntactically, I can't live without Heredocs because my project involves a lot of HTML generated dynamically through JS/CS.