skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny thing about the Golden Ratio, if you look for it, you'll find it everywhere.

Counter-argument to this:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm

tl;dr: It's everywhere only if you cherry-pick what you measure and occasionally squint.
Fibonacci Flim-Flam.
I didn't have twitter in my profile. Can you add me?
Although I think ICANN isn't the greatest body to be over seeing the tz database, I think it's a lot better than a single person. ICANN has the resources to distribute the database, facilitate new releases and obviously defend it from legal disputes.
Design Patterns in Javascript
I liked it and mailed the link to this to myself if only as an example of subtle (non-obvious) user-friendly things that can be done on a site. It's not too gushy (I'm not a fan of fanboism) but it's better to get constructive feedback of this type sometimes than the often bitter HN-bashing that seems to be the norm for folks who are invested enough to have an opinion and desire to share it.
It was just an glaring observation. I do remember the post about anonymous female members, but I didn't think it was something that was wide spread. Nevertheless, it would be brilliant if we could have more females on here[diversity].

Yea, I was looking for your account too[there is a more button on the bottom of the page]. So, I think maybe it is for people with twitter handles. I appeared twice, maybe trice[didn't reach that far down] with less Karma.

What are your suggestions for increasing our female population?
That page needs a QR code that links to the apk file or to a market:// link.

edit: In the meantime:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300...
Which community is bigger? Which app suite has a larger install base. The problem is that neither app is quite comparable to Office, in my opinion; neither has stolen market share from Office. A divided community will close the gap even slower.
Make authoring my own client in my own language straightforward. If you say "see our reference implementation in [some programming language I'm not using]" I'll be very, very irate. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about: http://docs.recurly.com/recurlyjs/signatures/spec/. Expanding on that particularly egregious example: a handful of unit tests is not a specification, and if you want a variety of developers to use your API you can't have its documentation be a set of unit tests. A set of unit tests in a third-party DSL is even worse.

Your documentation should be language agnostic. Everything should be described in regards to HTTP methods, not some aspect of your language, your language's standard library, or, god forbid, some third-party library in your language.

If you DO expect users to rely on a reference implementation, it should be as generic as possible. I'm not a [insert language here] programmer and I don't want to have to learn the ins and outs of [your sandboxing tool] and [your library management tool] and [some fistfull of random third-party libraries] in order to install and run your samples.

Always respond with the requested format, even on errors. Yes, I am advocating that you put a diaper (i.e. a try ... catch block that catches all errors) on your API endpoint. Diapers are generally a bad idea, but if I send you a json request that, for whatever reason, throws a server-side error, please return the error information in a json-parsable manner. django-piston is guilty of not returning json-parsable error pages, and it has the second-most followers of all bitbucker repositories. https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home

If possible, write sample clients on a variety of popular languages. Put your client on PyPi or RubyGems or npm or Pear or CPAN or whatever, just don't half-ass it.

Know your audience. It's perfectly possible that your target audience doesn't actually give a shit about RESTfulness and they're perfectly happy using SOAP or (gasp!) XML-RPC. Those things may not be "cool" in the buzzwordy world of dynamic scripting languages, but the reality is that they're still standards and yes, people do use them.

Be mindful of how insular HN is and where its interests lie; the HN userbase is representative of the HN userbase, not software developers as a whole. There's a creaking leviathan in the world of "enterprise" software whose foundation lies in things like Java and .NET and where mechanisms like SOAP and XML-RPC are still in use. SOAP is neither useless nor mandatory; it is used by a subset of the software development community, some of whom may be more than willing to give you good money to integrate with their services, if only you'd let them.
Considering it's a port/rewrite of Qi, which uses a Turing-complete interpretation of the sequent calculus, yes, it is more powerful than all those languages.

You're right to be suspicious at extraordinary claims, but the tiniest bit of research gets you the extraordinary answers in this case. I'm quite surprised you know of Agda, Coq, and Epigram, but not Qi.
A worthy goal, I often shy away from accepting uploads if I can due to many of these issues. A couple questions though:

-When I upload files, are you serving them infinitely, or just caching them so I can fetch them from my server?

-Are there any x-domain issues here? Can it work over SSL?
Apple is one of the most opaque companies out there — my bet is that we won't know what his last project was for a number of years. Also when Apple is working on the long term they tend to think of customer oriented features as much as specific products -- in that way if you see Siri on your Mac, iPad and TV set that could be a "Steve Jobs project".

For me Steve Jobs last big project was saving Apple itself -- a company that everyone had written off when he came back there. His other last big project will be seen as having destroyed the PC as the main platform for users -- much in the same way that he started his career by using the PC to take away the limelight from mainframes.

And lastly I hope out there is some kid who will be inspired by Steve Jobs to do the next great thing years from now -- I know it will happen, and I can't wait to see it (so the ball is in your court kids!)
For a second there I thought you meant Moravec-type uploads. (Not that there's a problem with those. No, nothing could possibly go wrong there.)
I think you need to distinguish here different kind of systems.

a) Deployment of 'standard' applications like Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, etc. It makes sense to automate it once and let people "self service" In this case either the sysadmin is responsible for packaging those apps or they can get a third party "catalog" that you can deploy to your virtualized/cloud infrastructure (that's exactly what we are aiming for at BitNami, you can check it out http://bitnami.org/stacks/)

b) Complex multi-tier, in-house applications. Those are much harder to automate because they tend to be "one off" systems and will require 'traditional' system administration for a while.

c) Web companies that run a logical application across multiple servers (like Zynga, Netflix, though obviously most people will do so at a smaller scale). Here you need to use something like Chef or Puppet, there's simply no other way of doing so.

In other words, before the advent of cloud it was 'optional' for system admins to automate their work. Now it is expected. In that regard, I think automation is the real benefit that cloud computing has brought us (rather than the capex/opex and autoscaling that people often mention)
If you are wondering about the odd price structure, compare the price and the 2010 impact factor (from Wikipedia):

Nature $36, impact factor 36.1

Nature Biotechnology $31, impact factor 31.1

Nature Cell Biology $19, impact factor 19.4

Nature Chemical Biology $15, impact factor 15.8

Nature Chemistry $17, impact factor 17.9

and the list goes on! at least they round down...
You are right. I misremembered his Stanford speech.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_bTbM8lbUTLU/S8dg-BMfi_I/AAAAAAAAAD...

source : http://samroweis1972-2010.blogspot.com
The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 11.10 [ISPConfig 3]
Mutated Search Queries on Google - Aggressive Search Query Refining
You also probably want backups to be tested. Many people, myself included, have been bitten by "I did not quite have what I needed to bring the production environment up again."

With regards to coders specifically: git and similar DVCSes is a lifesaver. If you have a sensible push workflow, loss of a laptop only costs you the laptop, the time it takes you to get a new machine to the state where you are productive (+), and whatever your average not-pushed-to-somewhere batch size is.

+ Having recent experience with this, Ninite + Dropbox + a monthly backup of my Ubuntu VM (where dev happens) in Dropbox = total recovery time was about three hours.
Just updated the description with an ASCII QR code, thanks for the interim link and good idea!
A fair point. If you find something enjoyable, then I agree the economic calculation is obviously different.
This looks very cool. I myself am working on a video service wherein users upload large videos.

For my particular application, I'm looking for something which can handle large files (500MB - 2GB), preferably giving file upload progress and being able to resume broken uploads. Could you talk more about those features?

Also, it seems like we would upload files to your servers, and then to integrate them with an app, I would then use your API to bring them over to my servers or storage. Are there plans to make the source of the uploading widgets/mechanisms themselves (not necessarily open-source) so that we can host our uploads ourselves?

Ooh, and how about something that is mountable?

Anyway, those are just a few of the things that immediately crossed my mind in terms of use-cases for my current project. I can see this being very nifty!
Looks like http://plupload.org/ does the uploading part of what you want to do?
People, Not Tech, Act Unethically
I just blurted out "What the f*ck. Oh my God" in front of my computer. I only started learning about data visualization a few months ago, but even to my nearly-untrained pair of eyes, the flaws of this monstrosity are readily apparent.

To quote Tufte from his link, "Can someone, perhaps an Inspector General, find out the cost and the contracting company that did this?"
You can get rid of any amount of money by wasting it.

But if you live a normal life with normal desires then a couple of million will go a long long way towards realizing your every wish, except for the absurd.

Your own plane = extravagance, multiple houses ditto.
These meta posts -- users sliced and diced by karma, what makes a good rating system, the role of humor (or lack of it) in a successful social site -- always appeal to my inner data nerd. It's got a bit of everything: programming, stats, html5, and, well, me. As a startup junkie, I'm all for anything that brings attention for my various efforts, like http://hn-books.com or http://caption-of-the-day.com

I'd like to see a live twitter feed of the top HNers, but not just their comments here, also their public posts on FB, G+, and Twitter. To bring the volume down to size, I'd filter out the bottom 90% by karma, then maybe filter again by average. If you really wanted to nerd out, you could even allow the user to have some sliders to set their own thresholds. Seems like it would be an easy project to put together (hint, hint)

I'm concerned about privacy in a big way. I know some would find my idea pretty uncomfortable, but I've long since decided that what I put on the net is my public life. I worry a lot more about my insurance company asking me to install tracking GPS devices or my local police force being able to check my ISP logs without judicial review. I'm okay with the things I made public being correlated. It's access to the stuff I feel is private without notice that concerns me a lot.
The one that springs most immediately to mind is "Wizard's Bane" by Rick Cook, which involves somebody making a programming language out of small spells which could be used to make more complex ones, but the book wasn't actually that good.

Much better written (and very popular) is "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", which you can find here:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

...Or in a variety of ebook formats from the author page.

Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" series never reveals much about the workings of its magic system, but it's made pretty clear that using magic effectively is mostly a matter of describing precisely what you want to happen, and closely akin to engineering. They're good books, and I like the idea of non-mysterious magic that you may have to debug before it works right.
At what point does a piece of technology become too essential to ever be allowed to disappear, even if it's under a legal threat that would otherwise kill it?

Or, looked at another way, even if the lawsuit succeeds and the tz database is judged a copyright violation, do you actually expect anyone to stop using it?
doesnt that seem to go against the entire natural speech model that apple is pushing with siri?
The Replay Pattern
Just installed it, very cool.

One quibble: The app does not rotate to landscape view when I open the keyboard on my G2 (which is typically how I view things).
Wait until someone gets the bright idea to mine all your past comments for factoids and pieces together your unauthorized biography.
Can you expand on this thought?
No its because he's using HN search. I would venture to guess that most of your karma is driven by comments, for which HNS records as 1 karma (comment karma is hidden, so HNS can't get that info and assumes 1 )
I once lost two weeks of work with an "rm -rf" typo. No backups, just gone. It was the 80s, and I had been careless.

Took me about a day and a half to re-create the work, and it was /better/.

I'm not saying it's a good thing to lose work this way. But it's seldom utterly catastrophic. (Exceptions like "the SourceSafe database and build machine start pushing up daisies the night before Final" . . . well, for one thing: Don't use SourceSafe, and for Pete's sake, make sure your backups actually work).
I'll never understand why these people get everyone's support but the tea party is reviled.
Wow, what a douchy site. Guess this is the tabloid for the indie world?

protip: When life sucks act perfectly.

The guy had his baby killed and these guys ream out the way he responds. He was working on making something that people enjoyed. Hearing people on the sideline, put that much effort into making him wrong strictly pisses me off.

There are risks in paying an indie for a game before he delivers - wow that's a shocking conclusion.

Feel bad for the developer, that's a kick to the nuts I hope I never experience.
libuv's realistically only an option if you're in Node. I know of no libevent/libev consumers at the C level who are going to switch to libuv as soon as it becomes more stable.
The Patent & Trademark Office new Data Visualization Center Dashboard
I'm adding a couple more cities right now, I'll unlock orientation change as well.
These days I freeze development environments by

- checking in the tools, as well as the sources

- running them in a VM, and backing /that/ up

- ensuring that none of the tools, certificates, etc. will expire

Gigabytes are cheap.
There also seems to be a fair amount of momentum around attoparsec, which has fewer features than Parsec but is very fast and works on bytestrings. Either is good; parsing is one area where Haskell really excels.
All together now:

Load a word, to A, load a woord!
Increment PC, incremeeent!
Load the next opcooode, load it iiin!
Oh, Loooord, now decooode!
Also check out http://cdnimag.es/ for the auto-resizer stuff.
Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere [Febuary]
I agree that as a career choice, "system administrator" seems less lucrative than "devops". Remember, though, that not every sysadmin job is for an agile software shop. There are plenty of places that care a lot more about patch cycles than they do about single-click deployments.

More importantly though, bill rates and capability do not track each other. Bill rates track risk. There is a lot of amazing- but- unproven systems talent out there, and there are some very expensive pikers on the market too. Generally I would agree that the more you pay, the less likely you are to have to fire 3 months later.

It helps a lot to be able to do the job yourself, soup-to-nuts, so that you'll have a better shot at screening candidates.
Ok. I've uploaded a new verion without viewport and without the overlay for mobile phones. Let me know how it works out for you.
California Declares Today: Steve Jobs Day
I think your article hits several issues on the head, and I'd like to drop my thoughts on what might actually happen...

I have some history in the telco world and while at a gig with one particular legacy carrier, noticed that when this topic came up in strategy sessions, there was zero sense of urgency. None. What. So. Ever.

My suspicions are that the rivers-of-gold experience of first vast voice revenue (tied to big investments that could be written down over a number of years) and then messaging revenue (which was just money for jam with very low overheads) has permanently damaged their business culture.

There are a couple of ways out of the bind that they're unable to face:

1. Innovate out of their situation by offering some value add that can be priced at value level, and not at cost-plus. Your suggestion of micropayments is a good one, and could be enhanced by their potential local knowledge of their market and user behavior to do commercially driven location aware services like advertising, offers and all those other things. Benefit would be to keep existing business customers on-board. Chances? Zero to none. Innovation is a big word in the telecomms world, but it really is just a way to flush billions down the toilet with not much more than deployed hardware to show for it.

2. Try to use their oligopoly situation (like the DSL and cable biz did) to stifle any new entrants at a regulatory level. This won't work too well because their new competitors aren't having to do buildouts - they're bypassing the carrier-customer relationship entirely. Therefore they'll need to be blocked or starved of bandwidth by the carriers. Chances? In some markets, like the US, probably 50/50 at this point looking at how successful industrial lobbying is right now. Net neutrality is their bête noir, and they'll do whatever they can to destroy any institution that tries to introduce it, like the FCC.

3. Avoid this whole shenanigans with innovation and regulators and do what oligopolies do best: price fix so that their customers do the dirty business bandwidth starve the innovative services out of the market because they only have 30Mb per month on the basic plan and it's USD100 for another couple of hundred Mb. Chances? If all the national providers move in lockstep and avoid any successful anti-trust investigations, it's easy and cheap. They'll never recover messaging revenue, but they could avoid other revenue erosion.

My bet's on parallel attempts at strategy 2 and 3.

One metaquestion: is your blog really uncopyrighted? Pretty cool if so.
Who is downvoting this? The point is that people can find a lot of fulfillment in work.

When I read about a programmer who stopped programming at 30 to go into construction, I think that shows programming wasn't really the right career choice for him. If it's not the right career choice for you, then by all means follow the recent spate of HN "retirement" posts and change careers.

But if you love programming, you can actually find jobs you like in programming! You don't need to retire! Talking to 30-somethings planning their retirement is...depressing.
So, we're playing with the terms ? That's it ?

As a sysadmin, I'm fine with the concept of continual improvement, there is nothing worse than a static industry. The job is changing every day and this.is.good.

What I understand from this post is that startup people don't want to deal with sysadmin anymore. It makes a lot of sense, considering the amount of time/energy/money you need to run a stable infrastructure. But at the same time, heroku, ec2 & al. will never be able to cover everybody's needs. So while I'm convinced that a dev or devops will be fine deploying his webapp to some random cloud, I'm also convinced they will come crying when massive load hits them and they can't tune the system.

The sysadmin is not only the guy who configure new servers, it's also the guy who explains the new dev dude that, no, he can't do 15 inner joins on large tables to create the home page because it will stress the IOs so bad that the whole website will collapse.

Ease of use != flexibility.
Well medicine's come with error bars, typically in the form of a doctor who determines whether the promised benefit plus risk is worthwhile for you. Often this is in conjunction with a consultation with the patient. So the general point that we don't give control to other entities that can make mistakes, I thnk still holds.

But you're right in the general sense: there are other areas where we leave the interpretation of the AI (as it were) to experts and have no say in it ourselves. Road bridges would be the simplest example I can think of (given that the safety simulations are akin to a simple form of AI).
Exactly. Fragmentation is the only thing that holds back the next level of open source adoption.
Hey, I remember you from HUT circa 2006.

I was comparing the level of primary and upper secondary school teaching with university teaching, not different universities. Seems like university rankings have little to do with that.

For what it's worth, I maintain that the quality of teaching drops by a whole lot in universities, if only because there are way fever universities around in Finland. My personal experience (some of which you share) is that in some common subjects (like maths) the group size in lectures more than quadrupled in the first year—way too many students for the lecturer to spare any individual attention, apart from answering some questions that came up in the class. Even the word changes from teacher to lecturer, reflecting quite well on the changed focus.

This duty of individual attention falls on TAs in smaller student groups, who usually have no pedagogical studies behind them and often resist taking any share of responsibility in how their students perform. The lack of attention to students is known and acknowledged, even marketed as 'academic freedom' and 'having to take responsibility for one's own studies'. While it's imporant to learn how to do that, the quality of teaching should not suffer as markedly as it does. Some struggling students banded together to overcome the steeply increased difficulty curve and others dropped out from the courses, often after the very first few weeks.

Speaking of catering to individuals, it would not take much to improve the life of an advanced upper secondary school student by a whole lot. Let the advanced students advance to freshman level concepts. Instead we faced the "it's not in the teaching plan" paralysis. It feels stupid to do three years of upper secondary level physics without touching vectors or calculus. Or bring out the matrices and linear algebra in maths (instead of showing a small glimpse in one elective course during the third year). Allow and even recommend some more advanced books on the topic. It must be better than playing Tetris on your Ti-83 calculator all day. Many currently bored students would regain some of the lost morale and momentum this way.
I agree. No correction would've been necessary if the article had been titled "Don't drink sea water (supported by scientifically inaccurate, but fancy-sounding facts)".