skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, this behavior is getting really odd. I was just wondering if there was a way to tell git to diff the current state with the n-1th commit (git diff --nth-commit 2 or something) and so I searched for

http://www.google.com/search?q=git+diff+most+recent+commits

In the first link more is inexplicably bolded. Okay, maybe people sometimes confuse more and most, I'll try double quotes:

http://www.google.com/search?q=git+diff+most+recent+commits

Basically the same result. Let's try plus:

http://www.google.com/search?q=git+diff+%2B%22most+recent%22...

Well that seems to work. I guess I'm not part of the A/B test. Any input? I think everyone needs non-fuzzy matching out of their search from time to time.
"There's just one small caveat: it might destroy our entire species."

:) No, but I think focus on the internet and electronic trading probably had a hand in the downfall of the economy. Look at how volatile the market has been since the 1990s. At some point we should all really evaluate whether we've gone too far. But technology is advancing our species also. We may be able to cure newly found diseases with the press of a button someday.
PolitiFact.com says "by the end of 2011" [1]. Looks like this announcement puts him on track to meet this campaign promise on the nose.

PolitiFact also has a more comprehensive set of Obama's campaign promises kept and broken [2]. Interestingly enough, most of the broken promises seem to be directly related to the GOP's efforts to keep the Bush tax cuts and prevent Obama from increasing spending for education, health care, environmentalism, and humanitarianism. [3]

[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/pr...

[2] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/

[3] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/ru...
Having worked on and off with SAS in recent years I'm aware it has its limitations, but round here we like constructive contributions please. Would you like to expand upon your remarks?
> First: scrypt (http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/) is far better than bcrypt.

Is there any independent analysis on scrypt? Only paper on scrypt I've seen comes from Colin. That's not meant as an attack; I'm interested in learning more, but can't find anything else.
Very true. I still have a cheap USB hub in translucent plastic from the Imac First Generation era.
The point of an insignificant spoofing attempt, if it isn't just ideological (and ignorable), would be to try to convince more people to do it (i.e. install the GreaseMonkey script).

Put it this way - say Richard Stallman suddenly decided that companies collecting analytics data and profiting by it (Ooyala doesn't sell it exactly, but we profit by it) was a bad thing and people needed to install a GreaseMonkey script, analogous to an ad blocker, that sent back bad data (wrong URLs, repeats, garbage, etc). That would be an individually-insignificant spoof which was potentially nasty in aggregate.

If designed well, it would also look an awful lot like a high level of background noise, but otherwise condition normal.
Ish. According to a response article* , the DOE loan is earmarked to only be used for spending within the US. The company in question also has a Delaware plant that they bought from GM and are in the process of hiring for and upgrading.

* ( http://www.grist.org/cleantech/2011-10-21-the-facts-on-fiske... )
The tech industry doesn't understand a damn thing about aesthetics, and until it does, Apple will dominate.

Too many people making decisions are afraid to let the designer come out with anything approaching novel. Too many engineers are too mired in nerdy product specifications to realize nobody cares about how many processors are in a phone. Too many designers are too afraid to stray from the archetypical Web 2.0 site.

This is not cause for despair; rather, it's a giant opportunity staring you in the face. The industry needs people with vision, taste, and the balls to push back on everyone else that would get in their way.
How many of those patents are solely Jobs'?
It's not that you aren't part of the A/B test, you just also used quotes. Try it again without the quotes.
Actually weather is one reason I wouldn't live in silicon valley - it doesn't really have any. It's either flatline boiling hot, or if you go north it's windy and foggy all the time. It's like being stuck in a never ending summer.

I live in England, where we get glorious boiling summers, wet and windy autumns, snowy winters. I know that's not for everyone, but the sheer variety is something I love.

To see the scenery and wildlife change by season is something that really makes life interesting.
Who writes these titles?
That is true. I haven't found an elegant solution for that, do you've a good idea? I thought about only loading new content when the 'scrolldit' logo is visible for a user.
Clever image recognition, or Amazon Mechanical Turk?
In Portrait or Landscape: How iPad apps are oriented in the App Store
A Soviet minister once entertained a visiting Romanian minister, and the visitor was duly impressed with the incredible luxury in which the Russian lived.

"How do you manage to gather such wealth together, my friend?"

The Russian just smiled and led his visitor to the window and opened his arms wide. "Oh, my friend, it isn't difficult for a man with connections and a little spirit. See that bridge out there? I issued each and every construction permit myself, and for every beam, every worker, and every rivet, I received a little something. And here is the result."

The Romanian was quiet impressed, and thanked the Russian profusely for sharing his technique.

Some years later, the Russian had the chance to return the visit, and came to Bucharest. To his great surprise, his erstwhile protegé lived in a sumptuous mansion and was able to put up an even finer meal than the one they'd shared back in the day.

"I am very impressed, my friend," he said. "You seem to have learned quite well."

The Romanian chuckled and led the Russian to the window. "Ha, yes - see that bridge out there?"

The Russian just squinted.

"No."
You become the first company to launch a phone that can be interacted with in 3D, you become very, very profitable.
Key insight here is right at the middle: "People will not adopt a technical solution that serves to replace a manual task, if that solution is less efficient than the manual task it replaces. How could we think that QR codes for marketing would work any better than CueCat? Did we not learn the first time?"

No matter how great technically, no matter what the reward is at the end, if you can't get people to use the product it's not useful.
Wow, you learn something new every day! That looks awesome. Surprised I've never heard of it before.
At Qwiki, trouble over company’s future
It's already like this. The core is called Redhat or Debian, and the fluff is called Fedora and Ubuntu.
I would be happy with a checkbox(sticky or not) or a search hint link that says "Include only pages that contain all search keywords".
This is a clever app in a cool space. Nice job.

Another example of YC's desire to make Craigslist obsolete (see also: AirBnb, Listia, Renthop, etc.)!
Battery life is pretty good with Gingerbread.

ICS will be able to run on any phone able to run Gingerbread.
Somewhere I have a 30 page report from an executive in a media company on why QR codes are the next big thing, because they are big in Japan.

If there was any red flag for me it was the fact that those that didn't know consumer habits, technology or why the milieu of both would effect the adoption of a new mode of doing things were saying these things.

QR codes were pushed because they hit the marketing sweet spot of engagement and measurability, without any acknowledgment of the dissonance imposed.

As I said once: "QR codes: like using a megaphone to seduce someone. The ugliest, stupidest, most useless (and used less) tech in a while."
Python library for symbolic mathematics
I have to disagree with you - I got my SGS2 this spring (live in Europe) and it feels quite right to me. Browsing, for one, is really smooth. I thing Samsung did a good job with their Android customizations (well, they copied a lot of features from iPhone).

However the iPhone UI is much more polished. That can hardly be debated, feels to me like the Android dev team "just made it work" and didn't have too much time to worry about polish.

I really hope ICS fixes that.
I've often seen a different, but related effect of client side analytics where content thieves will "accidentally" spoof analytics data by simply copying a site verbatim, with the analytics tag included.

In this case it's usually relatively easy to filter out, because the analytics host will identify the fake requests as coming from pages served on a different domain. However, it is annoying, and a combination of content theft plus hijacked DNS could result in more sinister influences.
I made an account a while back, but don't remember any details. The forgot password link pops up a new email window. I have to try logging in to even get the forgot password link, and then it throws a window at me.

It's trying to be clever. Clever can be fun and interesting, but password recovery is a well-solved problem. Sending an email to the dev to get a password reset (when I'm not even sure which email I used) is a lot of trouble when I have no problem with Reader.

I don't think it's the lack of a behemoth that's hurting adoption. It's just doing a lot of weird stuff without explanation when existing feed readers work fine for most people.
This headline could be changed to be: Car maker builds cars in Finland, gets US loan guarantee to build cars in US and create US jobs

Maybe it's a bit long for a headline

This news is also 2 years old!
I guess it's a job for a browser extension now to include all search keywords in double quotes. Will that stop this madness? Between Google Instant and this, I wish Google rolled back to an earlier version(excepting things like the Panda update which reduced spam results).
DuckDuckGo anyone?
I think it's partly a failure of designers to communicate what they can do. I do understand how hard this can be; my wife is a product designer, sometimes for tech products.

As I said before, I'm hopeful about both Microsoft and Google. They both seem to have gotten more serious about design, at least on software. Google is notoriously data-driven, and a designer who understands how to speak Googlese, with design theory backed by data, could have a serious impact. All the Google re-designs and especially Android 4 ICS have me very hopeful.
There always been distros that work like that. There's no such thing as the "Linux mentality" that you're talking about.
About the only ad that would get me to scan a QR code would be the promise of an explicit coupon code/discount.

My memory fogged up since so much time has passed, but last time I scanned a QR code I ended up on some fast food company's home page. What exactly did they expect me to do at that point? A coupon for a free softie/mcflurry whatever dessert product would have at least encouraged me to go visit the restaurant.
As a Gen-X'r (even though we don't call ourselves that- you should know), I say that is an awesome post. I'm pretty much sick of everything from politics to war to our economy to "Occupy" to "Bush" to "Obama" to "Jobs" (both kinds). What an economic downturn and world failure is good for is good music written about hard times. Where the fuck is our good music?
Well think of it as follows:

1. Windows phone is currently not suited for mid-range phones, and wont be till the next version. However, long term plan is to definitely push Windows phone towards a wide spectrum of price points and replace Symbian. This will take 2-3 years.

2. For now, till the time WP is ready for mid-range, Symbian is still alive. New devices are still coming out, primarily targeted at mid-range. Nokia aims to sell around another 100 million symbian devices, all of which will run Qt. I would expect Symbian sales to continue for another 7-10 quarters.

3. Even below smartphones, the so-called "feature phones", the space is evolving to accomodate even smarter devices. Nokia sees a big opportunity in making the sub-$100 devices smarter (we are talking unlocked prices here, not american subsidized ones). Those price points will be achieved with Nokia's own software stack. Currently, this includes S40 where you can write applications using J2ME. This will be evolved so that in the future you can write applications for such devices using Qt which is vastly better than J2ME.
As an example of this space, Nokia recently released a sub-$100 small touchscreen featurephone with inbuilt offline Nokia Maps. Nokia calls this low-end effort as its connect "the next billion" effort. Likely Qt will debut on these devices next year, when Qt 5 will be ready.
Nagrzewnice powietrza
I think Paul's essay got the point across, and I'm not sure what was gained by explaining it as 'Sustainable.'

In fact, one could argue that living on Ramen and the bare minimum is NOT sustainable, but theoretically profitable, and gets you by in the meantime.

Of course, maybe I'm overthinking this and the author is just milking a reference to paul graham for clicks.
Sarcasm is a new use. The original use is tied to the name, quoting what was said or written before.
I guess I was living in a fantasy world where I thought I could just take a picture of one with my iphone's camera app and something would happen. I tried a couple times and nothing happend.

So, how does it work?
I had high hopes for this update. So I changed the theme to a dark one and draw a table. Lines were black and you cannot change it (easily). There is no smart connectors either. Sigh.
The Website Doctor
How would one do that?

Lasers? Focused blasts of air?
I think there's a fairly huge difference between pointing out an exact attack on the primitive you propose versus dogmatically rejecting it because it's not commonly used. For one, it's possible to have this discussion and arrive at an obvious conclusion (attack does not apply).

First of all: try to understand what you read

I didn't read your blog post, as I clearly stated at the beginning :-)
Why would an error code be negative?
For programming questions I lately find myself getting better results with StackOverflow's built in search than with google.
What's the bet that this is a self-interested modification, so people can search for Google+ or any other plus-related products they might invent?
"The current state of the industry might be irrational, but so was internet advertising in the 1990s."

That doesn't say anything about their future worth though. Just because Google cracked the online advertising nut didn't make those who blazed the trail first and stumbled before them suddenly worth a ton of money. Quite the opposite, in fact.
80% of the time? No.

Perhaps not even 95% of the time.

However, someday, there will be a bug withing jQuery, or a misunderstanding of what it is doing internally, and you will have to debug. You will have to have understanding of the DOM itself.
This is a silly, content-free infographic...which I'll forgive, because it's Friday. But poorly-implemented mobile sites are a huge pain in the ass. I am sick of sites that try to shovel megabytes of advertising drivel at me over a 3g connection when I just want to check the news, and equally sick of sites that think one-sentence paragraphs are all that should fit on a page and that I should load each new paragraph in turn.

After the third time, I tend to avoid these news outlets and just not click on links to them. If a news story is important, it will probably be covered somewhere else soon enough. When I get home to my desktop, I tend to remove those sources from my news feed as well. Sure, most people won't bother to do that. But they'll stop clicking on anything with your name on it if your site isn't usable.
What about Octave? Other than my use in the Stanford Machine Learning class, I've never really used either, so I don't have any basis for comparison.
We always felt that using a relational database to power our service was a bit like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Every application is different but in our case, we would gladly trade off consistency for performance and schema flexibility. I am not saying that Microsoft SQL Server is slow, because it isn't, but it does impose a more formal relationship with your data and that wasn't the best fit for us.

We moved our whole data tier to MongoDB because we were not particularly interested in paying for more SQL Server licenses as we scaled up our operations.
Taking a look at Amazon's past user interface and experience choices, I'd say they skipped every third idea to make the site simple and user friendly.
Sensational title aside, the key issue is identified a number of times in the article itself - creativity. They're not being exploited properly and as has been said, what's the point in having a scannable code that does nothing more than redirect to a website?

Firstly, it seems to be hard for these agencies to appreciate that someone scanning a code will want to see a mobile optimised site, not the standard one.

Secondly, they need to add value, so make them do something the user will find useful (which most of the time isn't loading a URL). Eg. as contact codes on the side of taxis and on their posters; as SMS ones that prepare a text for you to sign up to a service or enter a competition, etc. Even those are basic but are a convenience.

There are lots of things to do, but none of this means QR codes are failing (there's no solid evidence in the article to support that claim). Just that there's no imagination or actual thinking going on.
Perhaps you could preload the content but not push it into the page. Then provide some kind of a visual indicator that new content is available. A slider on the side of the page that grows with the current position moving down the bar as more new content is available. You could then push that content into the page as they scroll up from the current position. This gives the user the benefit of knowing that there's new content available without the page shifting around the content they are viewing.
in fact, learning from the failures of others is probably more useful than learning from the successes.
I have moderately high hopes for Tesla, but I really can't see Fisker being a success.

It's weird-looking, expensive ($100K), has a very limited electric range (32 miles) and is incredibly fuel-inefficient (20mpg) once the battery runs out.

Furthermore, unlike Tesla, they don't seem to have a firm plan to proceed from a low-volume luxury model to a higher-volume cheaper model.

Besides, Tesla seems to have the rather limited "I'm a rich dude who wants to show how much I care about the environment by driving around in an expensive electric car" market sewn up pretty well. And the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt are far cheaper, generally better, and I'd trust 'em a lot more.

The only real question is how many Karmas will get built before Fisker goes bankrupt taking $528 million of US taxpayer money with it.

Car manufacturing is a really hard business to break into. If you look at the world's big car companies, they've practically all been around since the 1920s, and possibly slightly before. Kia was founded in 1944. I can't think of any companies (aside from offshoots of existing car or related motorized equipment companies) that have been sucessfully founded since the end of WW2.
You don't have to be a designer to appreciate the importance of design. What the author is bemoaning is that other companies don't understand the process. You see many stories of Jobs rejecting designs, but none about him sitting down and creating them. The position of a gatekeeper who critiques designs is different from a designer in important ways.
Oh my god. That’s intentional? Why? I don’t understand.

Makes me want to throw any Android device I’m using at the wall. You can’t imagine the amount of rage that creates inside me.

Why don’t they stop it?
Show HN: Domainsaurus — A Domainr/Wordnik mashup
Did you have extra costs due to more memory requirements? Any other costs? What about savings?

How long did it take to train the team to MongoDB?

Did you have a rollback plan if MongoDB is not good enough?

What were your requirements that made MongoDB better than SQL Server and the other DBs?
New Study Shows Cell Phone Use DOES Not Lead to Cancer
The “world’s most wanted hacker,” Kevin Mitnick, has gone straight
For the iPhone, you'd need an app that can read it. Google's app is probably the best for it, since it provides so much functionality otherwise as well.
Considering android's marketshare, though, I think these do have the potential to take off. Well, as long as people take this guys advice and make them point to coupons, or an actual campaign, rather than the URL on the billboard.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of using them in a print book/brochure as an easy way to get to multimedia. A photo book, for example, with a QR code pointing to a relevant video. Turns a book into an app!
Exactly - the results for most things are fine, but when it comes to searching for some technical topics, I have to look 5 pages further to find something useful (and I'm not even talking about the age of a lot of first page results - that can fortunately be filtered).
It's ugly and people want to use where they are also spending millions of dollars to make things not ugly. End of story.

Oh, and in the interest of making the future happen just a little bit faster, please fire anyone who thought otherwise on the way out.
I don't know quite why every recent competitive relationship in tech has been portrayed as an imminent existential battle, but it's an annoying trend.
that's nice and all that you responded. any idea how i delete my account as this obviously is not the place for me.
My recollection is that Octave is significantly slower than Matlab, and some quick googling on benchmarks [1] suggests that it is (was?) as slow or slower than R.

I've complained before that Octave is the wrong solution to the Matlab problem, and if you aren't attached to one of the many fine Matlab toolkits, you're likely better served translating to a more expressive language, like Python+Numpy+Scipy.

[1] http://sciviews.org/benchmark/
What is a loan guarantee, anyway?

Oh, I looked it up. Apparently it's an assumption of the risk if the company defaults. So if I'm understanding this correctly, from the US Government's point of view it has all the risk of giving them a loan (we're on the hook if they default), with none of the upside (if they pay it back we don't get the interest). Right?
This is ironic for me personally. 8 years ago a troll in the school library insisted that putting quotes aaround my one word search term would improve the results, and I laughed him away. Now his mad idea has been adopted officially.
Ugh, not a fan of this move at all. Just seems clunky and poor usability. I actually know a decent number of non-techies who know about and use the + operator. Seems bizarre to abolish it entirely.

Especially since if you do a search with "+", Google points out that's it's abolished but doesn't change your query for you (i.e. surely it'd also be good for usability to change [hacker +news] into [hacker "news"]?)
NASDAQ hackers spied on boards
Managing UI Complexity