skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The results are not changing wildly week to week, but you do receive new suggestions frequently (depending on how much traffic you receive). And with this kind of SEO (long tail), the point is that if you write a single blog post or article focusing on the suggestion, you will rank on the first page of the search engine within a few days. That's the point of HitTail - it picks out terms you will very easily (and quickly) rank well for.
Philosophy is rational thinking. Just like any rational thinking in any domain or discipline. Philosophy 'just' concentrates on the most basic concepts, the irreducible concepts.
And they're not some stupid VC funded hipster company, that's build in 2 weeks. They sell a few very solid products, not the unusable but shiny new thing everybody talks about for a few weeks and nobody remembers in a year.

Sure, some of their Apps could get some design overhaul here nad there, but they do what they're supposed to do very well.

Because of that success and the technical background (Rails) they build (in my view) a huge credibility, at least for me.
> The problem with buses for transport is they use the same infrastructure as cars.

I've always thought that was their #1 selling point. Light rails are just insanely expensive. When you've already got roads in place, buses become very attractive.
In Good Times and Bad, Gongs Are Just What the Doctor Ordered
"stop subsidizing roads and car travel"

I'm not 100% convinced by this line of reasoning. All major forms of travel (including walking) can be seen as "supported" by government policies and money. If nothing else, eminent domain plays a huge role in transportation infrastructure.

I don't think we can build infrastructure like this piece at a time to see which one wins. So there is no true "equal footing" or "fair" approach that everyone can agree on.
What to Test First, Second, Third
For a look at valuation methods, check out this post from a couple years back...it's where I typically start from:

http://47hats.com/2008/07/a-tale-of-selling-a-microisv/

Where the owner of HitTail started from is anyone's guess, but I'm sure it was "as much as I can get" :-)
I Don’t Want To Own Music, I Want To Listen To Music
Good suggestions - I'll cover these as much as possible in the next 2 parts of the series.
You make a good point. If film financiers are getting screwed like the article perpetuates then why are Hollywood films getting made at all? Let alone with astronomically high budgets.

Just a point of clarification and correct me if I'm wrong but executive producers are almost never the ones who put up the actual money unless they're say George Lucas (e.g. Red Tails). Instead they represent the investors to make sure everything goes smoothly with the film.
You have a responsibility to let your customers know in advance that you will be shutting down, but not to keep the service going.

You have a responsibility to your employees and anyone else that works for the company to do not harm their livelihood. Running a service that continues to waste money can eventually put the company out of business.
Cool job: Computer animator brings video games to life
Just last night I took an online test as a prescreen for a job I'm interested in. I guess this firm is C++ heavy so, of course, the test was entirely on C++. No algorithms, no problem solving. 30 questions with a max of 3 minutes per question.

I know enough C++ to write a decent GUI for a client (I mostly code in Qt, which is what hooked my resume in the first place). This test covered every possible wacky thing in the language, stuff I have no idea what to do with and is probably never even used in this company's day-to-day work. Nested namespaces? Template specialization?

Why do they do this? I'm totally discouraged from continuing onward with these people. I know I can do a perfectly fine job with this group. I think I'm going to take C++ off my resume and just give up looking for work in that arena.
Does the transitive property exist in sports? Not in the NFL
then i suppose we need 1/9999800001 !
Also, 1/4999 yields the sequence of square numbers.
I see your argument, and in some places, this might work.

I believe that in most places in the US, your suggestion that nearby property owners might support nearby transit to the extent of partially paying for it would be a non-starter. Usually, nearby (say, within 200m of the route) property owners oppose new bus/train routes tooth and claw.

One of the most famous examples of anti-transit sentiment from property owners is the congressional bill that Henry Waxman (a generally liberal Democrat) got passed, prohibiting a subway extension from downtown Los Angeles toward the ocean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westside_Subway_Extension_(Los_...).

About 25 years later, this law was lifted, but a lot of the sentiment remains.
I also recommend the book as the best and cheapest (< $20) intro to see if it's right for you.

I've run the process on myself probably 50-100 times (don't have my "case notes" on this computer and I don't recall the exact number) and a number of times assisting others. I also took a one day seminar a couple of months ago from Mindbridge at a cost of about $200. This was useful for networking with others who were interested in the technique, and practicing with a partner, but I think that most of the value from the process comes from learning by doing. I recommend creating a study group or finding a partner and just charging forward if you're interested in learning more.

The fundamental action of the CT technique involves drilling deeper into things that you think that you want (or don't want), that are actually placeholders for something more important and more fundamental.

Since this is HN, I can explain this process in terms of recursion and/or iteration - basically, you apply a function multiple times until you reach a stable limit cycle or fixed point. :) (The function is applied via asking and answering certain structured questions.) For example, you may inquire into your desire for financial success, detour through a need for acceptance by your family and peers, and end up realizing this is actually a superficial symptom of a deep desire for "inner peace".

Through the process, people often experience themselves getting closer to that state that is more fundamental ("Core State"). Usually this has a very abstract, "spiritual" description such as "Inner Peace" or "Being" or "Oneness" because it's very hard to put into words.
I majored in Philosophy. It requires reading a bunch of obtuse and boring stuff, as well as a couple of logic classes. It turns out if you do the homework, it makes the LSAT a piece of cake. So there's one practical use case.
By "Medicines improving blood flow in the brain", do you mean something like nootropics?
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AS A TWITTER STREAM
Well I've created what I believe to be, and what this article describes twice now for internal web-services[1]. Its really quite easy if you are disciplined and it really ends up being a very nice interface. The trick becomes if you want to eat your own dogfood with a website. Since forms can only post and get it makes it tricky without JS.

Otherwise I've been very happy and content with my 100%[1] restful webservices.

[1] According to this article, the one it linked to, and a medium skimming of the original dissertation.
It depends a lot on the circumstances. Here's a recent situation where the decision to make some streets in Chinatown pedestrian-only and removing parking on others (if only for a day) was supported and well-received by merchants:

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2012/01/24/chinatown-businesses-th...
Google+ Spreads to AdSense, Will It Spread to the Whole Web?
Married Dating Site
Married Secrets, a Free Online Dating Site designed specifically for people looking for married personals. Whether it's a passionate or romantic relationship, we work hard to find a perfect match.
+10000000000 points for all this from a guy with a Masters in Urban Planning. Also, anyone interested in this should be reading the blog Human Transit. http://www.humantransit.org/ or buy his new book by the same name http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/1597269727.

He focuses less on the differences between bus and light rail (unimportant distinction) and more on what it means to actually provide mobility that people can use. Rail vs bus is about as useful as emacs vs vi - fun for practitioners, useless for users that care about code or getting places in their life.
Apple's ebook sales restrictions: the newest reason to use free software
Aside from my HTTP/REST rant, I think there's a much better discerning factor between POST and PUT. From the HTTP spec:

"The fundamental difference between the POST and PUT requests is reflected in the different meaning of the Request-URI. The URI in a POST request identifies the resource that will handle the enclosed entity. [...] In contrast, the URI in a PUT request identifies the entity enclosed with the request -- the user agent knows what URI is intended and the server MUST NOT attempt to apply the request to some other resource. If the server desires that the request be applied to a different URI, it MUST send a 301 (Moved Permanently) response; the user agent MAY then make its own decision regarding whether or not to redirect the request."

So if you want to create the user Foo and you somehow know about the URI example.com/users/Foo, then you can directly PUT your information to that URI. This URI points directly to the enclosed entity, the user. If you only know the URI of the enclosing resource (aka collection), then you MUST do a POST to example.com/users/.

So that's the semantics of it, PUT deals directly with the resource that the URI points to, while POST deals with a collection of subordinate resources.

However, the REST catch is that if you follow the HATEOAS principle, there's (almost+) no way you would know about example.com/users/Foo. In the REST world, you would (almost) never use PUT for creating, because if that resource doesn't already exist, you would (almost) never get a URI to it by traversing the hypertext representation of the application state.

+ I say almost because you could have something like a GET example.com/users?name=Foo that would return 404 with the URL where to PUT to create this user. Not sure how HATEOAS proposes you get to a URL like example.com/users?name=Foo though, perhaps someone more knowledgeable can pitch in.
Right, but if the suburbs weren't so sparse... they wouldn't be suburbs. The empty space is precisely the reason many people choose to live there.
Google Reader "send to" shortcut for Hacker News
Sure, but we're not all about taking out the industry. The raison d'etre is undignified by the motivation.
Interesting work, did you consider taking other information into account ? For example, I tested your app with several friends which are in a friend list and it didn't suggest the other friends on that same friend list.
This reminds in a similar manner about the time when I did amateur theater. Considering that we kinda sucked, the director asked of us to do a run where we exaggerated every action and word and just basically go over the top. It got us performing better much faster than just incrementing slowly but surely. Going to the extreme makes you realise where in the middle is the best.
Saudi Presidency of Meteorology & Environment Protection Hacked
Recommends are handled the same way by both tools nowadays. There are configuration options and flags to switch them off it you prefer.
The Rise of OAuth
OpenShift Express — The Future Of RedHat PaaS
Reactions from CES 2012: The TV is the Next Frontier
Lobbyists 1, Internet 0: An Alternative Take on SOPA
This isn't pivoting. This is smart marketing to the right audience.

Never mind the fact that Pivot is yet another startup buzzword, pivoting is what Instagram did [0]: completely change their app from check-ins (think Foursquare) to a simple photo sharing app network with filters.

For even more info, this TC article [1] is a possible start of the Pivot buzzword trend.

[0]:http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/instagram-a-pivotal-pivot/
[1]:http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/22/mike-maples-you-have-to-be-...
We have the same setup, use local ephemeral disks on EC2 with Postgres. We never even tried EBS as we just heard too much negative things about it, namely its variance in performance.

So our approach is to RAID-10 (4) local volumes together. We then use replication to at least 3 slaves, all of which are configured the same and can become master in the event of a failover.

We use WAL-E[0] to ship WAL logs to S3. WAL-E is totally awesome. Love it!

[0] https://github.com/heroku/wal-e
Ring out the old year... a look at fundraising data from 2011
CouchDB is not a database
For what is worth, I contacted a few of our members of parliament - apparently with no success. All of them are a bunch of illiterate assholes anyway.

UPDATE: in case you want to contact them too, here's the list ... http://bit.ly/AkFjG6
I feel like zoning away industrial pollution is a bit of a band-aid. "That factory is generating a lot of pollution. Let's ... put it somewhere we won't see it."

Zoning a required minimum number of parking spots is indeed a terrible thing. Back where I went to college, that was a major headache for every business around campus. A bar was blocked from expanding because it couldn't acquire enough parking spots (and you want people driving to a bar why?), and the public library was required to put in a three story car park across the street when it renovated, demolishing a half a block of shops and apartments. This despite being a block and a half from a seven story car park which was never fully filled.

New York, on the other hand, doesn't seem to give a flying fig about parking. You drive, it's your own problem.
Statistical summary of 32.6 million plaintext passwords
BBC News: Android's share of tablet market jumps
If you’re going to work, build an awesome sandcastle
Know why the percentage of farmers in the USA is only 2%? Sure, we got better tech and techniques etc. but the reality is that farming sucks. It's probably the second most over-romanticized profession, right behind warrior.
No, the key issue is not fixing serious known (to them at least) security isses in the years they have been aware of them.

Even if the code was never stolen at all, this to me is at very least a shocking lack of due diligence and at worst completely and utterly unprofessional ignorance of the importance of security (to the point where if I'd paid for that particular software in the last X years I'd be considering action to get a refund on the basis that the software was not fit for purpose).
Is It Possible to Predict Pageviews 15 Minutes Into the Future?
You have to be registered to carry out direct debits, as well as supplying details such as address.
For years now I've assumed that's why A-list actors get such huge paychecks upfront, because they know they'll miss out if they're supposed to get percentage on profit.

But advertising costs has been one of the "excuses" I've seen why a movie fails to make money. I find that doubtful since the majority of advertisement spending is at the beginning of a movie's lifespan. Many movies continue to generate revenue years after theatrical release due to sales outside of movie tickets such as DVDs or streaming licenses.

In the end, I still have to wonder why such practices are continued to be ignored when they seem so suspect to begin with. Don't forget that the IRS is probably willing to spend a million dollars to squeeze that extra thousand bucks out of you, so I doubt they would just be OK with what they get.
A quicker proof is to just differentiate. For |r| < 1, we have

1 + r + r^2 + ... = 1/(1-r)

Differentiate both sides of the equation:

1 + 2r + 3r^2 + ... = 1/(1-r)^2

Here's a bijective combinatorial proof, which I like best of all. It uses the concept of generating functions. As a caveat, it only shows the equality for formal power series, not analytic power series.

The series 1 + r + r^2 + ... = 1/(1-r) is the type of tuples with entries in r. Then 1/(1-r)^2 is the type of pairs of tuples (the tuples in a pair need not have the same length). A pair of tuples can be mapped to a single tuple by concatenation. Conversely, a single tuple can be split into a pair of tuples. How many ways can this splitting be done if the tuple has length n? In n+1 ways; for example, the 2-tuple (a,b) can be split into the 3 pairs of tuples ((a,b), ()), ((a), (b)) and ((), (a, b)), which are exactly the pairs that concatenate to (a,b). Thus the bijection from 1 + 2r + ... + (n+1) r^n + ... to 1/(1-r)^2 maps an element of (n+1) r^n, which is an index 0 <= k <= n and an n-tuple, to the pair of tuples gotten from splitting that n-tuple at index k.
It displays the same message that is in this thread as an overlay, blocking out the home page: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056530490
Let's leave the internal disquiet issue aside for now.

The occasions of Google's data being compromised are notable for being exceptions, I think. Of course you're right that there's always the potential for misuse, and the only way to avoid misuse completely is to never gather data. It's parallel to the argument against big government. It's also parallel to the argument against nuclear power. But in each of these cases it's a matter of cost/benefit and risk analysis. You have to weight the risk and cost of misuse against the benefit of Google having that data. It seems that you're ok with the data Google has collected up til now, but you're worried about more data collection in the future. That's valid, but to me the benefits far outweigh the risk/cost.

Part of this is that Google's structured in such a way that its incentives are to keep the data private (within its own network) because it makes money by having sole proprietorship over it.

I think a salient distinction here is between privacy and confidentiality. Google and Facebook both collect a lot of private information about their users. But Google makes money by keeping that private data confidential, while Facebook makes money by selling the data. These are the companies' respective structural traits. And I think that's what makes Google unique.

> Google has served us so well so far because our interests are aligned; it's the surest way to prevent an abuse of trust in the future and why I'm so concerned about their new strategy.

Can you elaborate as to how this new strategy no longer aligns our interests with Google's?
Our "leaders" are such fucking corrupt shitbags.. It's disgusting.
As I said on the other thread, we only use the underlying friends graph for speed reasons: if we had to weigh the edges between people, it would be very costly in terms of API queries, which take time.
The end of Nokia?
Yeah, I'm not really impressed by a journalist who calls Zynga a "hot new company to work for".
Ask HN: What should Apple do with their $97.6B in cash?
This is a somewhat whimsical question, unless Tim Cook is reading this. But, if you were in charge of Apple and had $97B of cash on hand, what would you do with the money? What would be your strategic motivations? If you chose acquisition, what companies would push the Apple corporation forward?
The Other Vitruvian Man
I am not sure about this, but I think that if you adhere to the HATEOAS principle you could provide URIs for non-existent resources that can then be used to PUT.

Example a user profile may contain a URI to the user's profile picture although that does not exist yet, which means that you could grab that URI and then PUT a picture there.
Are you just HTTP-compliant (using the proper verbs and having Uniform Resource Locations point to actual resources) or are you truly 100% restful?
There needs to be a better way to communicate this problem.
http://www.stopacta.info/ has a lot of information but only for people who are interested in this matter will stay, everyone else just leaves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Xg_C2YmG0 is something you can show around.
adestefan, did you miss the recent impromptu session held by the nz parliament to amend nz employment law to make specific accomodations for a us corporation: a movie studio? no need to mention the upcoming film that was for. everyone should know which one.

and in general, it's probably true that nz wants to be a preferred site for filming by hollywood. the potential upside is undoubtedly far greater than whatever mr kimble can offer.

from a cost/benefit perpsective, saying no to nuclear weapons and saying no to hollywood are two very different things.
How to exploit WordPress version 3.3.1
For an 11 year old, a more visual pseudo programming language (see Scratch or Alice) is more appropriate than jumping into something like PHP or C. Even Codea is a jump... but Lua is pretty friendly for someone seeing code for the first time.

My kids aren't passionate about sports but they play soccer. The question that I could have asked is 'what's the best league in my area to be in?'. I wouldn't expect that readers would jump to the conclusion that we were living vicariously through them.

At any rate, I thought it was a reasonable initial question. We don't push kids into programming, but we do make materials available when they show interest. That's why I'm familiar with what I posted. However a comment such as "stop trying to live vicariously through him" comes across as rather snide.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3514232 - ACTA will NOT pass as of now since it's in validation of Basic Human Rights Bill, so it looks with exception of Poland and Czech EU is safe, but i have high hopes that our (polish) parliament will not ratify the document. So lets hope not everything is lost.

http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/bert-knabe/2011-...

here are more sources on the matter
I blogged about the science behind the app here : http://friggeri.net/blog/who-did-i-forget
Ask HN: Distributed compilation
Is there a simple way to compile C/C++ on a remote server? Is this even possible with libraries etc?
They are so totally afraid of Facebook-World taking over the Internet. It is as if nothing else exist on the Internet besides Google and Facebook. What a terrible days these are to be on the net.
No doubt there is plenty of room to argue about the best system. But to say that our current system is COMPLETELY arbitrary, and that fairness is WHOLLY irrelevant to the discussion is dangerous hyperbole.

It would certainly be unfair, even cruel, to restrict everyone's income to the exact same amount, regardless of what they do. It would also lead to extremely low productivity. The fact that we don't do that isn't arbitrary.

Our current system has evolved, imperfectly, from common ideas about rights and incentives held by various thinkers throughout human history. Let's not talk as though it were the first thing vomited out of a random law generator.
Solo contractors: saying "we" when you mean "I" is a fool's errand.
Incidentally, understanding how this works is helpful to programmers. If you know why this happens, you'll know why you can't write:

double x = 0.1;

and get something that works.
"Why of course I've picked a strong password, Mr. Sysadmin!" (password is "p4ssw0rd")

"Why of course I used a passphrase with my SSH key, Mr. Sysadmin!" (nope)
A mixture of investments (angel and otherwise), bonuses and philantropy.
Kodak Was the Next Company to Be Sunk By the Internet
In early November, as part of the promotion of my book about how businesses need to evolve to survive in the digital age, I asked, “Is Kodak the next company to get sunk by the Internet?” Turns out, the answer is a resounding yes.
Create Data Access Objects (DAOs) with Hibernate
Oh and I'm not totally humorless.

http://xkcd.com/386/
I happen to be using Python's built-in new multiprocessing module. It has a suitable queue. I am using the same logic to talk to rabbitmq. I would avoid tcp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER