skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Graph layout in 2D+3D
This was my dissertation project for my BSc Computer Science. I'm quite proud and finally got the damn thing online and working.

http://richthegeek.github.com/coffeegraph/

Instructions: use the toolbar, select "Wizards" and choose an option. Any number of nodes > ~800 will be slow, and I'd recommend using only a modern browser.

What's unique about this project? Well apart from being quite polished (I think) it's also got some heavy work into the Kamada Kawai algorithm - it uses a simplified BFS for APSP (cutting pre-run times by ~95%) and is the only KK algorithm I know of to work in 3D (correct me if I'm wrong).

Full source is available: https://github.com/richthegeek/coffeegraph

Boring write-up also: http://richardlyon.co.uk/dissertation_draft1.pdf

Let me know what you think!
I'm sure Android is much more to Google then the Android Market place.

Like iOS device, it's also creating an ecosystem of devices/service. How many people now have gmail accounts, and are searching through google then before they had Android devices?

Google hopefully understands (don't see any indication they don't) that they are getting a channel to market directly to users as well as obtain new users. This system gives them a platform to directly compete in a variety of media markets, now as a content provider in addition to their ad model.
This is clearly link bait.

Title: "College: The Biggest Scam We'll Ever Buy"

Conclusion thought: "Is college really a scam? Most likely, no."
He's doing what is known as failing upwards. This is what happens to people in the tech-celebrity/VC circle.

I expect he has learnt a lot - how to sell, how to shake hands, etc.
Why Did I Join The Empower Network?
I assume this poll is still valid with straight equity instead of options? I voted as such.
This may just be a pessimal interpretation of humanity, but I definitely read that sort of flip response as a quick way to dismiss the entire side's merits, attempting to show that they have an obvious agenda, are ignoring something obvious that shows they're wrong, etc. I certainly could be misinterpreting.
Creator of Mafia Wars shows how social games hack your brain
I think Microsoft taught us 3 valuable lessons:

1) distribution agreements and good relationships with hardware makers trumps quality - that's how they've beaten Apple and IBM (OS/2 Warp, launched in 1994 was better than Windows 95 and compatible with DOS and Win 16)

2) worse is better, a lesson they themselves took from Unix - timing is more important, you can always improve later

3) operating systems are natural monopolies - if you win the market of low-end PCs and keep growing, you'll eventually take over the whole market

If anything, I fear Google is the next Microsoft. I hope not because I love Android.
Baci Lingerie
Really, it is just becoming increasingly difficult to see how proponents of Scala can credibly claim any kind of developer productivity gains. I can only imagine how much time your average Scala developer spends solving problems of accidental complexity that simply do not exist in more mature languages.
Relax. It's obviously a joke. Nobody is a desperate enough to look for love on a 404 page ...
No, but I do use a Flash blocker. I find for the moment that's enough to keep me sane.
Ughh, Ghostery is available for iOS as well: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ghostery/id472789016
I think people should select the value they were able to sell their options for (post IPO) as opposed to the value of their options on IPO day... As lockout periods almost always keep employees from exiting for quite a long period after an IPO.
What you are describing is a Random Walk, 50/50 chance of going up or down, the previous data point holds no significance for the future. Mandelbrot discusses how this viewpoint is wrong in "Misbehavior of Markets" and describes market patterns using two movements: short trends and even shorter bursts. His multifactoral model uses these two ideas to model a market, however prediction is always difficult.
How much has your rent gone up? National average is 60% since 2008
OK, I guess I'm a completely different use case. Why multiple credit cards for purchases? Why don't you buy things using a debit card?
Ha ha ha - Amazon hasn't changed! They're still stuck in 1995 UI / UX.
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." -jwz

If you don't want your app replaced, enable it to read email. Parsing email is generally a clusterfuck. But I found out that it is really easy with EmailYak.
Duckweed: Simple, performant metrics
I might contact (or seek out) the developer if I only had one or two specific issues, but IIRC every time I've done the refund thing, it's because the overall quality of the app was simply worse than expected. I generally don't leave star reviews unless it's a glowing 5.
I think college is like better business bureau. A scam. You can learn everything you want yourself for free, instead of going to a college and pay an enormous amount of money for it. Especially now with the Internet, most materials you find online are multiple times better quality than what you get at college. Most graduates need to receive considerable additional training when they join a company. Bottom line is:

You don't go to college to learn; you go to college to get a paper certificate that you can show to others.

It's the problem of signalling and unfortunately, there's no easy solution for it. Colleges profit from the information imbalance and lack of trust in the job market. Some people recommend that instead of your certificates, your past projects should make up your resume. But then you get a catch 22 because others won't risk starting a project with you, unless they can see that you're capable from your resume. The only way to break out of this is the people you're going to work with must already know your abilities beforehand. Hence, you can start a start-up with your close friends or on your own, or become a vice president by knowing the right people at a company. For everything else, you need a resume for which Colleges are the gate keepers. And they won't give away that power for free. So enjoy your debt.

Signalling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

Better Business Bureau Scam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo8kfV9kONw

p.s. I can't say that the free market can sort college tuition fees out or colleges should be regulated by governments.
What's interesting is the author also says personalizing email subjects lowers conversion rates. I wonder if "Merry Christmas" would yield higher conversion rates than Merry Christmas <NAME>
Coffee Table is looking for an iOS Developer to join our team in changing the world of retail commerce. You’ll be one of the first developers to join our driven, entrepreneurial team. We value independent thinkers and expect everyone to be a major contributor. Catalog shopping is a $270B industry with 20B catalogs sent every year, and we believe that Coffee Table has a unique opportunity to transform the industry by introducing a new, engaging way to shop using mobile devices.

Position

You must love building beautiful, engaging mobile applications with immersive user experiences. You have a good understanding of mobile app design and development and are eager to contribute in all aspects, from product management, to interface development, performance optimization, mobile-optimized web API design, and more. You appreciate collaboration but are prepared to make good decisions, confidently and independently. You’re thoughtful, but action-oriented, and willing to act outside your comfort zone to get the job done.

Requirements

- Exceptionally smart

- You get things done

- Experience with application development in C, C++, Objective-C, Java, or C#

Highly Preferred (but not strictly required)

- iOS Development experience, ideally with one or more apps in the App Store

- Experience with Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, Core Foundation, Core Animation, etc.

- Design/UX skills

Bonus Skills

- Mobile web development

- Ruby, Ruby on Rails

- JavaScript

- HTML/CSS

Applying

When applying please include the following:

- A description of your skill set and background

- Link to your Github account, if you have one

- Link to your blog and/or any personal site (if applicable)

Apply Today! If this describes you (or anyone you know), send your resume or LinkedIn profile to jobs@coffeetable.com.
the linked page is blog spam. The content is taken from an earlier Daily Telegraph article without attribution:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular...
As always.. I'm super curious about the answer to the question that ultimately doesn't matter much in the conversion-context.. Why?

Given your history w/ testing like this, I'm curious if you see value in asking 'why', and whether or not there are useful ways to get an answer. It seems like in addition to satisfying my curiosity about human psychology, it would be helpful in informing next-tests to make the entire process more efficient... but I don't see much talk about the 'why' when it comes to these tests.
A road? Were you looking at the floor plan for one of the underground parking levels?
Thanks for letting us know this is an issue. We wish the permission settings were more granular in the Twitter API, so we could turn most of this off..
@Socialcam, I noticed one of the comments on your page stating that the videos are removed from the phone and not retrievable but haven't had a chance to test this. Is there a reason for doing this and if so why?
tl;dr: Argue that there are good real-world consequences to people believing that the AI won in this experiment.
Show HN: Buy Gifts by Describing the Giftee
http://www.GiftLizard.com

Core idea: Describe the person you're trying to buy gifts for and it matches gifts based on those descriptions.

How it works: items are tagged in many categories from descriptive, relationships (dad), jobs, hobbies, interests, personalities, places (garden). Items that match any tag show up, the more tags an item matches, the higher up it shows.

Some notes:

Products are hand selected and manually added to the site. The goal is interesting gifts and gift discovery. If you know exactly what you want to buy, the traditional hierarchical search works just fine.

There are only 150-200 Items in the database right now and 300-400 tags, I am adding more as fast as I can, the women's (mom, girlfriend, women, girls) selection is a bit thin (if anyone has some ideas especially in this category let me know!)

Any and all feedback would be appreciated!
Unfortunately, its been my experience that the Windows developer community rarely embraces anything outside of Microsoft. I hope your right though.
I would say that Amazon and Drudge look the most "recognizable" between then and now (with Google a close 3rd).

I wonder if that's simply because they haven't done a major pivot like many of the others.
I disagree completely. What about all inherent biases which make humans do things not in their best interest (they just think it is in their best interest, but many times they don't think, they panic) ?

See:
- Loss aversion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
- Sunk cost effects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
- Status quo bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias
Mental note: don't live near firing range.
Note: voted twice for two different exits. Fortunately for the poll they had different outcomes :)
The fact that Apple makes a lot more profits than Android manufacturers is nearly of no consequence for Google. Microsoft managed just fine as Gateway and others crashed and burned.
Yes, surprisingly, a large portion of statistical research in finance and economics assumes normal distributions for model formulation, prediction, and error checking.
Disclaimer: I work at http://mailgun.net/

Sending is actually 1/3 of email. The other two are receiving and storing. :)

Even sending by itself is such a complicated beast that only a select few allow customers to do it properly, and to properly do sending you must have receiving end set up as well. Your deliverability goes up when you allow replies to the sending host. ESPs see replies as participation and it makes a difference. That's why we keep preaching: No more no-reply emails.

Another elephant in the room is spam. If you silently accept everything coming to your MX host, you're asking for it. That's how some email platforms do the receiving end. GMail can get away with this because they employ a small army of PhD's to deal with spam. To have manageable volumes of spam, you've got to be able to generate SMTP bounces for invalid addresses. The list of things to do in order to receive properly goes on and on. Hooking up incoming SMTP traffic to a Python function is the easiest part of receiving mails.

Long story short: if email is critical to your app, you have very limited options. Roll your own or sign up for Mailgun, which is basically a Gmail-like back-end which makes your application look and feel like a real email server to other ESPs, not a mass sender of $0.0001 emails. Mailgun also has other advantages like automatic cleanup of garbage MIME bodies - this always hits you hard in production, and standard MIME parsers for most languages won't cut it.
simplistic can be pejorative, but in this case it doesn't seem to be, atleast from my perspective

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pejorative
> A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts.
> It guessed wrong for me but if the 'ExampleCount' value is accurate, you are dealing with a paucity of data.

Yes, you guys are the guinea pigs, sorry about that :-) We'll need a lot more data before it is really going to get interesting.

> Will it look for more decision nodes to add or are you stuck with region and browserHeight?

There are quite a few more, I pasted them in another comment. You can also see them if you "view source" on that page.

> If not, how certain are you that you have the right data to accurately model the problem?

I'm not, the fun of this is seeing how well people's favorite pets correlate with information their browsers give up automatically.
Zeldman takes Paul Irish to task over Move the Web Forward project handling
After we got acquired by Microsoft the option were converted over to MS options and the strike price was something like $1.14. Yeah, the stock plunged; but I was pretty confident they'd never be underwater :)
http://www.giftlizard.com clickable
The macroscopic problem that SAP works on is collaboration within large organizations. How to make processes more efficient while reducing bureaucracy. I'm not saying they're doing a good job of it, but that's the task. It's a big, very interesting task.
Class action by software developers in 3..2..1
I don't specifically block ads, but I only execute white-listed JavaScript which effectively does block ads.
Welcome to Apple’s Grand Central Terminal store
He did publish his methods (how it was set up, what the rules were, etc) and data (they let him out on X tries), just not the data that would interfere with the ability to do the experiment again (e.g. his exact strategy).

Not much different, in principle, from not publishing the names of people who participated in drug trials.
THIS IS Not A DR(E|I)LL
I find the typo in "DRILL" interesting because "E" is typed with the left middle finger and "I" is typed with the right middle finger.
I'm Diggz, Chief Evangelist at Tropo. I'm sorry you had a negative experience with Tropo. We're constantly improving our docs and services and would love to hear any feedback you have. I was recently made aware of your SMS load test with Canadian numbers and I believe with a couple of tweaks, we can get those SMS's cruising along.

For SMS-only apps that don't use voice or speech recognition, we also have http://SMSified.com which is a RESTful API based on the GSMA standard for SMS - launching in international beta soon (U.S only ATM).

International SMS is tricky (as most will agree) but we do have many devs and customers using our Tropo Canadian SMS service without performance issues. One of the reasons we don't charge developers to test on Tropo is because we know it takes time (and lots of testing) to make an app that your customers will be able to trust and rely upon. Feel free to email me at diggz at tropo dot com.
Roger Dickey, creator of Mafia Wars, shows how social games hack your brain
Just to make sure I understand: in "Can your REPL do this?" the word "this" refers to printing Unicode characters, right?
As opposed to the brainwashing that happens all of the rest of the time?

As a pastor I despair of making enough of an impact in an hour or two to overcome all the influence of school and work that people experience for many tens of hours each week and the average of twenty hours (or is it more now?) of TV that people watch.

For the record, I prefer "Merry Christmas", except where someone is obviously trying to invoke a guilt purchase.
Phil did a great job both before and after his MS career. He will do well at GitHub as well. He's one of the good guys in the C# world, and both GitHub and Microsoft will benefit from this.
Not sure how I feel about this on a site that manages pretty much all of your financial accounts for you.
Yes! This is great. I also haven't switched to Python3 because there aren't any "killer features". 2.7 works fine for me, and it often feels that the reason for switching to python3 is mildly religious.
Still images. Nowadays most of these emails are made up of entirely images... so checking "Okay, go ahead and show me" is effectively opening the mail.
It might be interesting to split this by exactly what sort of exit -- a talent acquisition is just as much an exit as an IPO or a high-priced buyout, but probably won't give nearly the same payout.
And some employers will match charity donations, so you may be able to double your contribution!
It's PR. And it worked - got to the top of HN and probably sent around other places. It's just an advert for mint.
Researchers devise way to measure properties of viscous fluids, like ketchup
I've seen earlier screenshots of Amazon.com than that one. http://www.telco2.net/blog/images/amazon%20early%20screen%20...
I'm not formally trained in CS, are there "modern day Dijkstras" in the field that I should read up on? I'd like to stay up on the underlying technological advances in computing, and it's just fun to read up on this stuff.
Frankly, I think that most of the time, their methods are plenty rigorous. The only difference between them and research engineering labs is that instead of writing a paper, they produce a television segment.
Daily Mobile Minute #67: SEO has no place in mobile
This didn't happen at the air base, it happened on a firing range.
Ugh, I thought I'd answered this but looks like HN lost my response :-(

> How big is the pool of variables it can choose from?

Currently it is just: screenWidth/Height, browserWidth/Height, browser, browserVersion, os, referrer, city, region, country.

It picks the variables based on how well they partition the datasets into diverse sub-groups. This is the code that does that job:

https://github.com/sanity/quickdt/blob/master/src/main/java/...
I actually don't agree with this at all. Everyone loves to hate on college, but personally and professionally on average there is a world of difference between people that come from a good school and a bad school.

We are all lazy, I would rather have fun and party; that's a no brainer. However, rigor and competition and some metric(grades) to compare students is what pushes and motivates them to succeed. Creativity is possible in creative subjects, if you take drama, music, or art grading is going to be very different than in chemistry or physics. This has nothing to do with the system, and more to do with subjects.

Not everyone thrives in the system, but not everyone gets joy out of learning either. Problem is that there are a few good schools and a lot of bad schools, so on average you'll hear poor experiences, but this is suffering from the silent evidence effect.
Cool. As someone doing heavy WordPress development (and will be doing even heavier dev. in the future) this is a step in the right direction.

The available tools for WordPress right now are just awful. I'm doing plugin development right now (but will get to themes in a couple of months); and in order to setup unit testing it took me a full 3 days.

When coding plug-ins, I noticed that I'm using awful and very old patterns (like mixing PHP with HTML). It's like I'm working on PHP when I was 15 years old. Checking a few WordPress plug-ins (popular and premium ones), it even proved to be worse: They were using procedural code and patterns. Huge and long code, a bunch of functions with long names binding to WordPress actions or filters.

Here are the improvements that I'm looking for (and working on):

1. Better Unit Testing: A better stack for Unit Testing.

2. Better debugging: Debugging is just a nightmare when doing WordPress development and your project (I'm using Netbeans) should point to your plug-in repository.

3. Developers plug-in: A plug-in to manage your WordPress install

4. Bootstrap plug-in: Administration interfaces (styles/tables/forms/buttons...)

EDIT: I just noticed that the following

Include the assets in your Haml views using include_javascript() helper.

= include_javascript("application")
This will produce the following HTML, pointing to the assets/javascripts directory:

<script src="/wp-content/themes/YOUR_THEME/assets/javascripts/application.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

This is a very bad practice. You should use WordPress functions to queue scripts and styles.
Might get better results by making reference to science and glorifying Dawkins the savior as the reason for the season. The free thinkers are trained to gather around and financially support anything with Dawkins' name in it.

This effect is not an accident. It is the result of organized back-patting that happens all the time on the Internet
My only intent was to say that in my experience some data has been quite readily available. In our case it was enough data to understand our son's weight was trending in an unhealthy direction. We made small changes to the quantity and quality of food available to him and reversed the trend. The 75th percentile just happened to be the trigger in our personal case. I make no suggestion that it is an appropriate trigger in general, or that it equates to 'being too heavy.'
Well, you are not writing PHP, CSS and JS. You are writing an application (or a part of it), and these higher level languages allow you do that more efficiently, that's all.
Jewel Kade Review.
Good exercise.

Note to self: they got the data; they didn't add much value; they presented the data with fairly clean design; it could be argued that this is a data mining web app but there is a flaw if the plan is to produce income by engaging the user.

Note to feldmanr: http://www.programmableweb.com/ says that there is 4535 APIs. It's not even possible to read the documentation for a subset of them to figure out whether you can get an incremental user ID or not. But even if you did and even if you used some of them you are just producing a fun fact. Hardly a reason to come back for more. Yet, the exercise is a worth while; one gains knowledge about heterogeneous nature of web APIs - a skill necessary to build profitable data mining web apps. Please, do come back with an idea that can clearly retain your users beyond single visit.
Mobile Morning Coffee (12/07/11)
Maybe there should be an option "None - never had stock options"?
Do they have an API or some way to get the User ID?
Ironically, it's a TV show we're talking about here.