skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, of course. But it was very slow. And the interface wasn't nearly as polished as the iPhone's. I don't know how much iteration will help them.
Is this short film an allegory for triumphs and pitfalls of startup life?
Hacker News vs Reddit and Digg
Hacker News has completely taken me away from Reddit and Digg. I seldom visit those 2 big news sites as I get all the contents I want on this site. Has it happened to you also?
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

While it's good to grow a system, and I (and many others) practice it and recommend it, I'm not sure about the invariably part.

I'm sure there are exceptions: like the famous space-shuttle software with minimal error rates; or the aircraft control software that has been mechanically verified in some ways (no null-pointer errors I think); or industrial control systems...

But maybe these even systems did have simpler prototypes, which were then enhanced in simple steps? I know I make faster progress when I operate like this. Or perhaps the prototypes were in the form of an algebra (or other abstraction), which developed from simple to complex in small steps. The final translation to code is also a simple step, and the final product only appears to materialize fully-formed.
But you didn't actually say anything about your values. Here's your post boiled down to actual content:

"I want to start a business related startup. I've worked for a small startup. I've got enough cash to get us through the first few months. I live in Canada."

Other than that there's not much to go on. Would you jump at a pitch like that?
Yes, completely.
Merb 0.9.7 To Be Released Tomorrow
Great new stuff coming in right now. New router, caching, and bundling (was freezing).
I still pull top stories from some of their categories, but I never go to the actual sites. HN is my new home.
The new gc will be an improvement but is is till not as good as Erlang's garbage collection, which is per process.
Search engine Cuil is valued at absurdly high level of $200M, despite flop
Regular visitor. But not completely yet. Still visit Reddit.
AskHN: Ideas for side scrolling Dexter?
2D gaming isn't out yet I guess, back in the age of atari, snes, gba, we used to see some amazing innovations & ideas in 2D games, we never saw the same for PC ever, Well I would like to contribute more to this shortage of quality full screen, eye catching engaging, platform style 2D games for PC. My tools of trade are allegro, gcc
Planning a side scrolling game based on Dexter's laboratory.. any ideas are welcome!
groupings and alternation can't be implemented in such a simplistic regex engine that matches the target while parsing the regex. Here is a more sophisticated toy haskell engine that uses a real parsing library http://jcreigh.blogspot.com/2006/12/simple-regex-engine-in-h...
David Foster Wallace, Postmodern Writer Is Found Dead at Home
well, reddit prgramming is still good. I also follow delicious. digg is nothing but crap now.
The Fibonacci Spiral and the Nautilus
Interesting discussion on the "making of" & "technical details" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303619
discussion & source code here ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303572
Being on a phone with a dedicated keypad will help more than any software. Android's strength is largely not software. The software only has to be passable, and there's no way the Alliance will let it not be that.
"... Applets failed client-side because the JVM locks up the computer during its 30-second load times ..."

Back when applets where the rage, this type of lockup was often worse than 30s, with multiple applets and multiple data (images, sound) requests over HTTP on dial-up lines.
I was 90/10 HN/Reddit for a while until I found out how to customize using sub-reddits. I'm now about 40/60 HN/Reddit for reading articles, but I don't read comments or participate in discussions on Reddit. Simply too many trolls to make it worth my while.

edit:

This site is the best for startup news. That vibe has almost completely left Reddit and been transplanted here.

The discussions here are probably among the best Hacker discussions that I've been able to find anywhere online.
me too; however, i sometimes check slashdot too ... the comments are wittier and funnier (while still being thoughtful) than hn
agree i dont understand digg now and what to see on that
never tried slashdot yet...i guess its an old warrior still hanging on strongly
how is the repetition in both these sites? i have found it too much for the contents i am interested in
Wow didn't know this existed. I never really got along with Squeak but I was intrigued with the language. I'll give this a try.
The mind's mirror
Anywhere I can look up on their definitions?
Yamaha FZ-16  Everything You want to know about | Computer World
Many a marriage has started with an offhand comment about the weather, just to break the ice.
It's not a pitch, it's an ice-breaker. A signal of intent. The equivalent of cracking a smart joke to the girl next to you at the bar: You both know what you're after, but neither of you can know whether you want to be with each other until somebody makes the first move and gets the ball rolling (which should NOT be a summary of your entire life's experience). That's all this is; I applaud.
Hofstadter's law:
"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."

It should be considered one of the basic axioms of programming, maybe even engineering, although I'm just biased because it is an infinite (perhaps even strange) loop.
Defining The Open Web
We need more good puns here.
i am interested in spirals and generating them with recursion, i got some new ideas thanks to this.
It's moved me a bit off of reddit, though I have to say there's a lot of content that gets cross posted (usually from reddit --> HN).
How is Apple less restricting than others? Who is 'others'?
Ask HN: Who do you respect, and why?
People here seem to diverge from mainstream in how we value achievements -- in how we define what is truly 'prestigious' and what is merely faking / pathetic.

Google lets us make snap judgments on people dozens of times a day. When you google someone, what grabs your attention most? What do you consider to be prestigious, or worthy of respect? ...examples?

And the converse: What do you see people emphasizing about themselves over and over again, which actually signal they "just don't get it"? (What do people do in their online/public lives that you think are really stupid?)
Your examples perhaps don't look far enough back, and assume "system" means only one specific piece. One could just as easily assume that the "system" in the case of the space shuttle begins with flight and rocketry and the transistor and ends with NASA in Houston flinging a few tons of crap, and a couple of humans, into space and then bringing most of it back down again, usually intact. The software in question was made up of many pieces, many of which were proven useful and correct as parts of prior systems, such as the Apollo rocket guidance systems.

However, if we really take it to that extreme, I guess we'd end up with every "system" starting with fire and the wheel. So, I think it should perhaps be "Gall's truism", or "Gall's rule of thumb", though it doesn't have quite the same ring to it. It isn't quite provable, but can't really be argued against very effectively, either. And, you know, if you pretend like it's a law, it probably won't have negative consequences, while convincing yourself it is false very likely will have negative consequences.
Palm's products were stable, with a good developer environment, but the hardware itself started to look ancient compared to the PDAs that HP and others were offering at the time.

Seems like Palm did the software part great, and failed majorly on keeping the hardware up to date (they missed the boat or were late to the party on flash memory cards, color screens, and wireless, that I can remember anyway).
Was that supposed to, you know, make sense?
I think what josefresco was trying to say was that there are other situations in which Google has been "heavy handed" with what are reported as real sites. This obviously isn't one of those.
10 Reasons why someone should use opera browser - review | Computer World
Interesting. I never questioned this but I also never tried to prove it. I wonder how this all started, and how it became commonly accepted as a truth.
Well-roundedness. Programmers who can write, designers who can code, and so on.
Most of the programming reddit is reflected here on Hacker News, but if you pick subreddits like Javascript, Web Design, Haskell, Lisp, Python, Ruby, Computer Science, Geek, Cognitive Science... You can get a nice selection of Geeky articles that aren't covered here.
I imagine he meant major cell phone carriers and their app decks.
HN really is the hidden gem of news sites and communities. I love it!

.

* Great stuff on the homepage....ALWAYS something I'm interested in!

* The comment system isn't full of witty comments just said to get karma....Reddit is big for this, and even Digg, even though it doesn't have an overall user karma system!

* Overall, HN makes NEW knowledge, it doesn't just pass on current knowledge - people asking questions, and getting answers, both in submissions and comments, is a massive sign of the quality of the users.

.

Long live the current state of HN!
I have not clicked through to read this article, but I will nevertheless make several attempts to summarize it judging solely from its Hacker News headline:

- If you want to have better sex, try to employ the use of more charts in the bedroom.

- The author unveils a time series chart contrasting his copulation frequency with his masturbation frequency.

- The author is attacked by plain-jane charts everywhere for espousing an impossibly high standard for chart sexiness.

- A JavaScript charting library is so good that it makes the article author want to have sex with the JavaScript library author.
Excellent post, thanks. :-)
This is quite an interview; particular how he sets out discussions of the future.
That's very interesting, because I've always felt that it should be possible to parse the regex and match the target at the same time... (though nobody ever does it that way, instead doing it with 2 passes).

Do you know of a proof that grouping and alternation cannot be implemented in this way? (formal or informal).
I really have to buy his "Underground History of American Education". Read "Dumbing Us Down" a few years ago already, but that's more of an appetizer than the full meal...
I really respect people who know their own shortcomings, and work hard to overcome them. In an effort to live up to my own ideal, I acknowledge that I often fail in this regard, and often catch myself dismissing something I don't immediately understand.

The converse of that is that it's always sad to me to meet someone who can't admit what they don't know, or can't acknowledge the achievements of others. All of the people I've known that I consider brilliant have also had an amazing amount of humility about what they didn't know, and have been fast to praise the achievements of others. It's a goal I strive for, but again, I know I often fall short.
My friend works as a freelance developer. He always carries both set of cards. The blank ones are not only standard boring white --- they are literally entirely blank.
I'm pretty sure every single phone I have had (and I have an 3G iPhone now) has been more open for development than this one.

Every single one has had a public SDK and public development tools. And no vendor-approval needed.
Ask YC: AIR or HTML/JS or Obj-c for visualizing data?
I'm developing an app which is going to have a visualization component. The data will be shown in a graphical manner, somewhat like Gapminder.

I'm confused about which platform to choose for development of the client. Html/javascript, Flash/AIR or Objective-C.

I like the idea of using objective-c as I think it's quite responsive, and will break me into the Mac/iPhone world. But I'm worried about reducing my market.

I'm unsure about AIR capabilities. Finally I think working with HTML/JS for a graphical project will cause problems as stuff won't work on different browsers.

Can anyone help, by providing some insight from their experience of doing something similar?

I do know html/js/css and python. I was planning to use pyobjc.
That's a really poor looking device. Regardless of the software, Android needs a design conscious handset in order to compete with Apple, HTC or RIM.
Bloody context. I just read 'AmiPro' as 'Am I Pro?' and thought for half a moment it was another shitty iPhone app.
Interesting indeed. I probably couldn't do that as my handwriting is terrible.

Bouncing off that for a second though, one of the more interesting ideas I saw were business cards for a second hand store.

What they essentially did was get other people's business cards and literally cross out the contact information and replace it with their own.
HENRY FORD: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay
Dean Kamen on The Luke Arm.  Simply Amazing.
Yes the same has happened to me, but I've noticed I go to several different specific news sites instead of Reddit and Digg now. There was a recent post about a slinkset site I think it was called Infosec Update or something that seemed promising. I use a lot of Pligg sites as well now.

Digg is, well, Digg with all it's failings.
Reddit recently turned into 4chan.
HN I like as the SNR is quite low but I have started to see posts for things that are less related appearing as the community grows. I've also spotted the same sites popping up again and again.
absolutely, I just hope that HN will not get advertised too much, because then we will be flooded by the digg-like submissions
Parent voted +5 (Insightful)
"Voters are not that rational, after all"

What if people make accurate snap judgments of competence?

Not necessarily perfect, but better than 50% (e.g. 68.6% and 72.4% in TA).

To test this with politicians, we'd need to test the judgment against an objective measure of competence. This could be made after they completed their term of government, and taking into account only their actions and responses, and not circumstances beyond their control.

But I wonder if is there an objective measure of a statesman's competence...
Just to reply to my own post, the site was called Infosec Update - http://news.mandalorian.com if anyone is interested.
Collectively, HN posters and commenters seem to 90% get it. Unbelievable for a website like this.

Reddit runs at about 50%

Metafilter runs at about 40%

Digg at 5%
2d and 3d game and rendering engines for python
Are you serious? All Android is is software. It just happens to support a lot of different types of hardware, and the first phone has a dedicated keyboard. And saying it will help more than anything is certainly a matter of your opinion.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the experience-- a combination of the software, the hardware, and the network.
I bet the first Android devices will be total crap.
And Alloway of Motte & Bailey says he’s able to outwit the megalisters’ computers, provoking price wars and then buying up books at below market value, holding them until prices readjust.

And yet in the mind of most people, small and independent bookstores are the good guys and big book-selling corporations are evil. Baffling.
FORTH probably has one of the coolest covers in the history of programming books...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeljohnson/1396636973
Advertising in strange places
I use both HN and progit (programming subreddit); though HN < progit for technical programming articles.

However, the big plus of HN is the 100% absence of trolls (or maybe I just don't notice them here because they aren't encouraged). The most horrible thing on reddit is several people with technical competence who use it to abuse people - a form of trolling. I find that combination hard work to deal with.

I wonder if a factor is not "diluting responsibility" (psych 101) too much? HN is a smaller site (and has pg overseeing it); subreddits have fewer subscribers; /. has fewer (randomly chosen) moderators. Is too much dilution of responsibility what undermines social sites like Digg?
Probably because ( is not a valid character in an URL.
Thanks for your offer. One comment: I never needed a calculator for any university math classes. But in physics it was very handy.
What if people do make accurate snap judgments of competence?

This would be pretty interesting if it were true at any major level of significance. I doubt it could be as high as 68% though.

More significantly, what someone looks like should probably be outclassed by other factors. There's no real measure of competence except competence. Looks are just noise. But that's not how voters tend, apparently.

Recall the Warren Harding effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Harding

He wasn't much of a politician, or an orator. William MacAdoo describe his campaign speeches as "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea." But he sure looked like a distinguished statesman.

Yet he was a bum. One of the worst presidents ever, though immensely popular in office.
I respect only one thing: competence.

In fact, that breaks down into 3 things: competence, knowledge, and experience, but only because the last two are often indicators of the first, so it would be unwise to dismiss them.

Achievements are a symptom of competence, so I do respect people who have achieved what I consider great things.

However, even where someone is knowledgeable, experienced, and having apparently achieved great things, if they display something which indicates a severe lack of competence, my respect for them will automatically decrease - not to zero, of course, but still, it can take a severe hit.
Very thematic, indeed. Do you have any more information? Does it annoy the crossed out people?
They should have written it in K:

b:4>@[n;&0n=n:+/_sqr 50{c+(-/xx;2/x)}/c:+,/(-1.5+2(!w)%w),/:\:-1+2(!w)%w:200;:;4];`mic 6:"P4\n",(5:2#w),"\n",_ci 2_sv'-1 8#,/+(2#w)#b
Or by using Lynx?
Horribly off-topic, but interesting (at least I think so):

As far as I can tell, "(" is in fact valid. In the URI standard [1], a URI has a `path` which is made up of segments. Each `segment` is a set of pchars delimited by by "/". The `pchar` character class includes the `unreserved` character class which contains the `mark` character class which contains both "(" and ")".

That said, I'd argue that "(" and ")" should never have been allowed because of the tendency for people to mention web sites like this (news.ycombinator.com). I'd also argue that trailing punctuation should be ignored for cases like this news.ycombinator.com.

But oh well, it is too late now. These characters are in URLs and that means they are here to stay.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
This sort of post is one of the great failures in social news sites. 7 upvotes, 13th on the front page, zero interesting content. The cause is the plague of feel-good "me too"-ism, groupthink and lowest-common-denominator-ism that causes people to upvote things uncritically and eventually leads to the mass-upvoting of poor articles and comments (especially the immortal "[pic]", agreeable question/'vote up if' or 'hilarious' YouTube video) over good more thought-provoking, challenging and nuanced ones. I think it's a big flaw in the concept of social news sites ala Hacker News, Reddit and Digg.

Relevant to the topic, I've been moving towards MetaFilter lately as it doesn't suffer from this problem as much due to the design of the site, has the bonus of hand-moderation and the $5 entrance fee is a surprisingly good way of limiting membership. The flip side of this is that the content is a very mixed bag in terms of submission quality and topic due to the hugely different styles and interests of submitters - even more so than other social news sites. The comments there are often unparalleled in terms of quality, however, and Ask MeFi is an invaluable resource.

I poked around with Planets (blog aggregators on one topic) for a while but the amount of content is generally overbearing to make it impractical to read them for any great length of time.

I'm slowly but surely warming to the idea that old-style blogs that link to the other content may be a good idea but the question is finding a good ones that are regularly updated, whose moderation you can trust and whose interests align with yours. I do read Boing Boing, Ajaxian and Engadget who follow this format, but I think Slashdot has suffered from it over time by deviating from its core subject matter, has become a caricature of itself especially with regards to its biases and suffered from dumbing down over time. Of course, it's still an open problem as to where they get their content from and how they filter the good from the bad.

Perhaps the conclusion is that the whole concept of a link-driven news site is still largely an open problem - and I'm certainly not sure what the solution is.
I try to respect everyone, because I've found my own happiness seems to vary directly in proportion with how well I do this. In both directions.

I think you're also asking about who you admire, and what achievements you admire. Great questions, need some thought.
Bridgewater Philosophy
Finding Profits in a Distressed Market
Ask HN: effects of prefix notation on coding / thinking
Hi all. I was looking, and failed to find information on the net on what kind of effect coding in prefix notation has on the way you think, compared to infix notation.

I know that after a few months of toying with arc, the prefix notation seems to be clearer to my mind than similar code in infix (I still code in ruby at work), but finding anything concrete on the net about the effect of coding in prefix is tricky. I mainly run into blog-posts expressing a similar feeling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis
http://www.frozenreality.co.uk/comic/bunny/index.php?id=919
I would add Google App Engine to the list and see it a direct competitor to Microsoft's Live Mesh.
Thanks for posting this! Extremely interesting.

Here's another very interesting story involving Dean Kamen, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3533.html
For small pieces of data, we can already use cookies as a client-side storage.
Stopped by a Datasheet - a Freescale microcontroller | Your Electronics Open Source
Son! Son!! I don't understand this android thingie you're talking about: where is the hard drive?
Read about an engineer who was stopped by a datasheet
Comcast Tech Support Call | TechJaws
Django turns 1.0 (and why that matters)
FYI, rfc3986 is the latest for URI syntax (obsoleting rfc2396), but you're still right, and the grandparent comment is wrong: parentheses are legal in URIs.

News.YC also mishandles '<' '>' around URIs, which is the recommended manner for delimiting them. (Consider, for example, <http://www.example.com>.)
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that..."

The 5 real reasons to avoid iPhone 3G:

* iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can't be on everyone's phones.
* iPhone endorses and supports Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology.
* iPhone exposes your whereabouts and provides ways for others to track you without your knowledge.
* iPhone won't play patent- and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.
* iPhone is not the only option. There are better alternatives on the horizon that respect your freedom, don't spy on you, play free media formats, and let you use free software -- like the FreeRunner.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/why-free-software-and-app...
Aww, come on, what was the point of that? ;)