skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the data that you're collecting. However, some of the visualizations are ineffective. Perhaps it sells in your target market, but things like bubble charts and gauges are horrible for showing data. You have pie charts but then proceed to display the numbers on the graph. Why do that? A table would have sufficed. Pie graphs don't demonstrate much other than that people can't figure out angles.

If you're making a metrics site you should look in to some of Edward Tufte's works. Things like sparklines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte#Sparkline) allow you to display a large amount of information in a very compact area, and with high resolution. I look at "Average daily tweets" and see 22.5. Great. Was today a low day or high day? If you give me the history in something such as a sparkline, I can tell if this is increasing, decreasing, or simply an off day. Did Christmas influence the number of tweets? If I go back tomorrow I won't be able to see today's information in quite the same form, which may be what I wanted.

Sorry if this seems like a rant, but I see a lot of data visualizations at work. I drown in metrics, charts, and graphs. Most have information I want, which is why I look at them. However, I can't always get the information I need.

Just make sure your customer gets the information they need out of your graphs, not just what you want to show them.
The premise of the original post in this thread is fatally flawed – the livelihood of law enforcement, corrections officers, judges, lawyers, and everyone else does not depend on putting personal drug users in prison. They can keep their jobs, and put their talents to use on matters that actually benefit the public's best interests.
Now, I'm more inclined to transfer my domains..
If I were a registrar, I would have rate-limiters on domain info downloads to prevent harvesting by spammers. And those rate-limiters would be set so as not to interfere with normal demand, but might be tripped if, say, everyone tried to transfer out their domains all at once.

Just sayin.' Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by reasonable engineering heuristics...
Show HN: SOPA Sponsors
Finally released the domains from GoDaddy by clicking on the domain and doing 'Accept'.

Now, when I do a whois it's showing as registered to eNom (I was xferring to namecheap) and then showing domain not found.

On namecheap's side it's showing as pending - not action required from me.

Anyone seen similar behavior?
Kissmetrics are fans of the Lost (IP address of their blog)
GoDaddy have breached ICANN regulations before (e.g. after updating contact information, 'resetting' the 60 day no-transfer-out rule).

I'm not surprised in the slightest that they're doing it again.
1. contact a Lifehacker writer and offer to: do an interview and give them some 'promo' codes as a 'thank you' for their readers taking a look at your app

2. write a blog post introducing the app, thanking all the new users and lifehacker.

3. spend some money on advertising (facebook/google/maybe even on lifehacker) for two weeks.

4. update something in the app and release a 1.x version update for free. then start working on v2 with the goal of shipping as soon as possible. keep your blog updated on a weekly basis with a simple 'status' of how the new version is coming along, with teasers about new features or speed or whatever.
Came here to say this. Thanks.

I love Asepsis. Those .DS_store files really bug me. Because I have to show hidden files to see Eclipse's .project and .classpath files, that means I also have to see the zillion .DS_store files.

Stupid, stupid file name choices by Eclipse.

(Period prefixes are default hidden on Unix, for all you Windows users.)

PS- TotalFinder is great too. Big improvement.

PPS- Tried TotalTerminal for a while. It's okay. iTerm2 is enough better that I switched.
I guess you aren't looking for app critique but my thought is that most web users see "Facebook" and "compromising photo" as part of the app requirements and no matter what your privacy policy or mechanisms you have, most average users will not go for this
In addition to this, I recently discovered that Flask doesn't support Transfer-Encoding: chunked (which is part of the HTTP/1.1 spec), and doesn't fail gracefully either (when receiving a chunked request). Then I discussed it with Armin and realized that the WSGI spec prevents Flask from doing either. (See also http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2009/aug/10/wsgi/)

Time to fork WSGI?

ETA: Upon further investigation, there's a big discussion out there on what to replace WSGI with, here's one entry point: http://dirtsimple.org/2011/08/is-wsgi-lite-library-or-protoc...
"I agree wholeheartedly. Viewing drug usage as a medical problem and funding free treatment seems to be a no brainer. That pesky problem seems to go back to Congress."

How is drug usage a "medical" problem? It's a personal choice. Most addicts aren't born addicted and they make the choice to pick up that first joint.

I don't want to make it easier to be a drug addict in this country. Especially at my expense.
But GoDaddy reversed their stance on SOPA. Did the makers of this site miss that news?
Android architects should be able to make it easier for proprietary drivers to interoperate with future Android releases, by standardizing on interfaces.

I think though, that there has to be real push back against the rooting/warranty policies. If I take my car to an independent mechanic, it does not void the warranty. If I hire an HVAC contractor to fix my air conditioner, it does not void the warranty.

If Samsung, et. al., can point to legitimate ways in which a rooted/modded phone can break the phone irreparably, what that tells me is that's an indication of poor design on their part. As consumers we should expect they fix that, not make third party mods difficult.
What about alcohol? It was once illegal to consume in the United States. During that period, we created a violent "war" that enabled the criminal syndicates. Since lifting the prohibition, those criminal syndicates have moved on to other prohibited substances (e.g., narcotics), while the alcohol industry has thrived, generated tax revenue, and been forced to comply with government regulation in the public interest.
Those are opinions, not citations.

I'm surprised you didn't mention "tort reform" too, another one of the debunked talking points.

If government is so bad, why does Medicare/Medicaid help more people at less cost than private insurance?
That's pretty cool, hopefully we will have better support for multiple logs soon
> Do I have to do everything myself?
> (+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)
Getting a programming environment is indeed a barrier which I have experienced a number of times. This contrasts with schooldays when I could start writing a basic program simply by switching the computer on.

Why don't Apple, Microsoft etc. package the stuff you need to get start programming with their OSes? (So one could begin learning with 5 mouse clicks or less.)

Sorry if this is a hopelessly naive question
Yes. There is nothing to accept in Godaddy so far. It's been a few hours. Happening to another domain of mine too
hey HN -

I put this together because I was curious who the actual sponsors of SOPA were.

I welcome feedback on how to make the site more informative. In particular I would like to include links to some of the best articles discussing the issue. Any suggestions?

Thank you
I was planning on writing something like this in the next few weeks for my Flask app that runs on the Rascal (see profile for details), but now I won't have to.

Thanks, Max.
How that idea is going to get through to someone who is somatically and / or psychologically addicted to drugs is a little difficult to comprehend. In the same vein of people will fix themselves of drug addiction is a mostly useless statement. People get into this situation either involuntarily or voluntarily, but few get out just by platitudes or sheer will power. Most people who put drug addiction behind them need a cast of people and tools to help, there is no quick fix. To be effective for anyone but the rich help needs to be available free at the point of provision. The money saved from reduction in direct and indirect crime and the increase in production will pay for the service. In most cases families see the value in reforming a drug addicted family member, why shouldn't the state? This is an effective method and motivation to solve the problem; you can reduce the demand of all of the people some of the time, you can reduce the demand of some of the people all of the time, but you can't reduce the demand of all the people all of the time; hence trying to eliminate demand is a non option to fixing the problem.
Show HN: Try to Pass FizzBuzz From Your Browser
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're different.

The higher the language, the more abstract the abstractions. Each symbol represents more, and therefore hides more. There are manipulations on the symbols that are plausible in context but idiotic when one looks at the hidden details. I see that regularly with developers who have only worked in higher-level languages. From their perspective, they will see two approaches to the problem that will be equivalent. However, there will be 3 orders of magnitude difference in performance. By definition (well, your definition) that doesn't matter in a higher level language. In practice, it does.

I don't think I've said that Java is some sort of magic universal middle point in languages (and indeed, I don't think that exists), so I don't accept the burden you're pushing on me. You asked how a language could be too powerful, and I tried to answer your question. If you have more questions, feel free to ask.
New Auto Newz
The latest Auto news, motor show reports, spy shots, new car launches and industry gossip from Autoworld.
Well, Facebook does the same from a different angle, they just didn't start out with such a large portfolio that they now inject social in - they started with social and now try to inject it into anything they can get their hands on.

The basic hypothesis is: People are social, social drives usage, so let's put it into everything. The problem is: We already have social in everything, without their help, just not in a way that drives their usage.
You bring up an excellent point, which most people in the "developed" countries fail to realize: The human cost in the producing end of the chain. Yes, it's horrible to think of people getting addicted and all, but how about the violence generated by the underground production, distribution and commercialization of an outlaw product? Is it right to try to prevent a few people from addiction while submitting entire populations (millions of people) to the terror of cartels? (either fighting them or living under their rule)?

PS: I am Brazilian-American, so I have experienced both sides of the "war on drugs".

Edit: I realize my post is a little confusing, but just to make it more clear: My point is that the "war on drugs" causes more damage than drugs themselves.
It depends a lot in the field you'll be working actually. If all your startup does is data ping-pong from fronted to DB, maybe collaboration software or alike, math has little to none value.

If you are building the next speech recognizer, siri 2.0, social media consumer market analysis, meme detection and tracking, financial planning and prediction, quant. trading, ebay bid e-assistant, consumer-advertiser matching etc, then math has a big influence over the result.
I don't doubt the C99 committee did a fantastic job maintaining backward compatibility with extant code-bases which use ill- or un-defined semantics of older standards. But I don't think that the success of the committee at doing its job necessarily redeems C99 as a semantically sane language -- indeed, I would argue that the need for design-by-committee is indicative of the hefty baggage of backward-compatibility issues which necessitates such convoluted semantics and boxes the C language into a linguistic dead-end.
As a female programmer I get the same blank stares from a lot of men also. I explain what my programs do and how they make certain processes more efficient, talk about our customer stories. But then, I don't work for SAP or some vague consultancy firm. I have a friend who is a manager in an oil company: I have no idea what he does day to day but I do know that he gets to take a helicopter to work sometimes. We talk about the cool stuff.
Jeff Atwood's article on FizzBuzz: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
It's not really about the architechure of Android so much as it is the bullshit, erm, unfortunate licensing that goes into the graphics drivers, RIL, etc.

Even the 4.0.3 source drop for the Galaxy Nexus was awkward because half way through it Google had to stop and go get terms to release updates to the proprietary drivers for their own Nexus device. From my limited understanding, if you want to build a (not cheap, but... affordably, expensively cheap) phone today, there aren't exactly open-firmware hardware choices.

The only way to physically damage the phone is to do some of the (inane) extreme overclocking. Not sure what they can do about that except do more at a hardware level to set caps on that sort of thing. I still suspect the reluctance for rooting/roming is from the carriers (tethering and support primarily). This seems to be backed up by the fact that at least one of Motorola's new phone has an unlocked bootloader everywhere except the United States.
Ask HN: ASP.Net shared hosting alternative to GoDaddy?
Who is cheap, reliable, and anti-SOPA?
Very weak premise, basing human capability on lunar landings alone. I can argue that if we do not reproduce the Higgs boson in forty years that we've peaked right now; more likely, the interest simply isn't there in repeating an experiment for the good of science unless capitalist interest catches up, which we are seeing in spades with private companies making strides toward suborbital and orbital flight.
this is awesome! can't believe most programmer's can't pass this
This seems like a bizarre leap from what mhartl was talking about when he said "A business should do what the owners want it to do", which is what tomjen3 was defending. Given the choice between a reasonable interpretation of someone's comment and an unreasonable one, it seems unkind to choose the unreasonable one without even asking for clarification.

When you hear someone say something like "People should be free to choose their own destiny," do you come in guns-a-blazin' about how they shouldn't be free to choose a destiny where they kill people or beat children? Because that's usually not what people mean when they say that. I think mhartl and tomjen3 were just suggesting that this same principle applies even when the person is a business owner — that people don't suddenly have any one particular goal forced on them just because they happen to be running a business.
I'd be interested to see comparisons between the engineering of getting humans to the moon versus keeping the LHC working.
Thanks! I think this is a really great step-by-step script that works perfectly for someone really new to this, like I am.

Can't say how much I appreciate you spending your time to give me (a complete stranger) such great feedback!
I think FizzBuzz is complete bullshit, I find it very hard to believe most programmer's can't solve this.
I always wondered how successful those apps and languages (Logo etc.) are as learning tools.

It seems like a great idea - you make colorful apps, that are easy to fiddle with and you sneak in coding under 'move dinosaur few centimeters to the left' cover - but 'real' programming is not very much like this - it might create false illusion to those children, that it's and fun and easy, and you get real programs working after 5 minutes.

Illusion, that will break to pieces when confronted with real world - and I think that disillusionment might actually discourage kids.
GoDaddy: A glimpse of the Internet under SOPA
Thank you do much. I have wanted this for years. I know that Netflix is interested in predicting what I will like, but I basically never like movies with a tomato score below 75 or so, so before I always browse netflix with a rotten tomato tab open.
I'd add as a third point, that among people who've used a relatively broad range of legal and illegal substances, alcohol and tobacco are widely considered two of the most disgusting, damaging, abuse-prone substances known to man
Thank you for the correction! You are right. I was thinking about the act of "aerial-spraying of drug producing crops". For Wikipedia: "In many cases the spraying is carried out by American contractors, such as DynCorp, using planes and helicopters to spray Roundup on coca plantations. Aerial spraying has been repeatedly condemned by human rights and environmental activists because of its affect on human populations and local soil and water systems. In December 2000, Dutch journalist Marjon van Royen found that "because the chemical is sprayed in Colombia from planes on inhabited areas, there have been consistent health complaints [in humans]. Burning eyes, dizziness and respiratory problems being most frequently reported."
This is so ridiculous I don't even know where to begin. Apparently, and without any evidence given, humans cannot fly to the moon anymore and that's why we don't go: we lost the ability to do so and we're ashamed to admit it. Again, there's no evidence for this, and no attempt to explain how or why we have advanced so far in so many other areas.

Then, as if this stupid theory wasn't enough to offend the intelligence of the reader, we get this gem: affirmative action and media whoring committee members stole our ability to fly to the moon.

Just wow. Why was this posted? As a spot-the-fallacies exercise?

Frankly, this guy seems supremely uninformed.

That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans.

How or why was it the most difficult problem solved? Why was is the supreme human achievement? We'll never know, because the author is too poor of a thinker to bother with justifying his assumptions.

It's post-hoc reasoning if I've ever seen it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc)
>Marijuana possession is already decriminalized in many states in the U.S...

But it's still illegal at the federal level, and federal penalties are quite severe. Prosecutors can force you to plead to other charges with the threat of turning you over to the feds on marijuana possession.
Cool prototype Facebook fan-counter button using CSS3
I would argue the issue is more about the priorities of the American government and also its economic decline. America has fundamental issues that means it can not longer fund such a mission, but it is likely that other governments and economies that are healthier and with different priorities could do manned missions to the moon.

It is important to differentiate between human capacity and the capacity and priorities of the American government. They are not the same thing, even if when one lives in the US, it can seem like it.

One could argue (similarly incorrectly) that human capacity in Britain peaked in the late 1800s, but again that was because that was the peak of the Britian empire.
Thank you for your suggestions.

The "Executive Summary", where you see gauges and pie charts, is where you should get at a quick glance an Idea about how your campaign is going: If the trend is good or bad, and you your tracked influencers contributed to that trend.

To signal a positive, negative or neutral trend, I didn't find a better alternative to gauges. Please notice that the actual numbers the gauges show aren't easy to interpret - they're related to the steepness of the linear regression of the daily reach. So what I'm actually communicating could be expressed as "a little positive" "strongly positive" "strongly negative", but a gauge look good to me for that. Reading the number isn't that significant per se.

I also remember a heated discussion here on HN about pie charts, but I'm still convinced that they're good when you need to show the relative impact of a few alternatives.

Including sparklines in the first page could be a good idea though, I'll have to see that with my target market - for now I only had one reference customer to talk to, so I reckon that that isn't a good statistical sample :)

More detailed data is in fact shown in subsequent tabs.

Last thing: The bubble graph isn't good if you need to really compare the dimension shown with the bubble radius, but the other two dimensions here are much more important and for those I think this graph works really well. What alternative would you suggest to show three dimensions in a single chart?

Thanks!
Thank you very much for your input. And I'm always looking for app feedback! :) I think you point out a real obstacle to wider user adoption, but I believe in the concept (and I think it needs some 'lack of privacy' for it to work).

Furthermore, I reckon we sell fun, rather than productivity.
Try on a webkit browser.
But they do a lot more requests. With the amount of transfers they get now, some automatic DDoS protection could kick in.
> 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

This sentence makes a lot more sense of you replace instances of "could" with "wanted to" and "capability" with "desire". As does the remainder of the article. There's no particular reason to go to the moon and it's extraordinarily expensive, so we don't do it.

Edit: I guess this guy is just a little irrational. Here's another example where he says that science is a curse that comes from not having a shared theology: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/06/cancer-of-epist...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
-Hanlon's Razor
Two hundred years later, the sitting vice president (Cheney) was accused[1] (probably correctly) of corrupt dealings. He just ignored his accusers and nothing came of it.

Now, I realize you were responding to the statement about lynching, but it's worth noting that challenging someone to a duel is what you do when your honor has been questioned. In fact, the Wikipedia page on "Honour" includes an illustration of the Burr-Hamilton duel, with the caption, "Alexander Hamilton defends his honour by accepting Aaron Burr's challenge."
It also describes honour as deriving from "perceived virtuous conduct and personal integrity."

It would seem that honour really was a more important thing two hundred years ago than it is today.

[1] http://www.google.ca/search?q=Cheney+corrupt+dealings&hl...
Isn't that your problem? Get to it!

Using the OSM's online mapping tool is fun. I really enjoyed doing the maps for around my home - it made me look up streets I'd never noticed. I felt I learned a lot about my local area.
Most people won't understand it is 'go daddy' hijacking the process and may get frustrated by delays. One guy in this thread thought it was a name cheap problem, for example.
This guy doesn't know the difference between tracking trends and "predictions". Trends are based on decisions already made.
This is standard practice to increase the friction of unsubscribing. How many clicks does it take you to logout of Facebook or Google...and see if your grandmother could even figure out how.
Why is the most prominent image a map? Is there really a geographical component to this issue? Or rather, is that purported geographical component so pressing that it requires a map that takes up all available above-the-fold space?

* To be less harsh...I think it's great you're gathering up the important legislative facts about this bill. I just overreact when I see maps being used for seemingly little purpose.