skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With Python, which has the easy_install utility for installing its own packages, I use the virtualenv mechanism to create a "shadow" environment connected to the machine's main Python but with its own library/package folders.

With that, I am free to install anything I want in the secondary Python, I still have access to distro updates for libraries that I chose not override in my environment and I am completely cool I am not hosing my main Python install.

In the unlikely event there is nothing similar to it for Ruby, it would be trivial to develop it.
How significant would said arbitrage be, though? In terms of percentages of individual purchases, sure, but if there's a way to scale it up it isn't obvious to me.

In Mexico, the same problem exists, although by the sound of things it isn't nearly as acute as in Argentina. In general, established and professionally run businesses have change; small and informal ones do not. (I think this stems from security concerns: large and well-run businesses have private security and insurance; small ones do not.)

After a while you learn the strategy of making certain purchases at certain places and where those places are. (This can sometimes leave you in a minor bind when you're outside your regular stomping grounds.) You learn the optimal amounts of money to withdraw from different banks' ATMs.

So, having small change buys you not just goods and services — all money does that. It also buys you a bit of time and saves you from aggravation. It really sucks to wait 5 minutes to get change back from a small purchase, as the cashier leaves the store to ask all the neighboring stores if they have change.

Finally, the same phenomenon exists in stable and well-developed countries too, albeit writ small: just ask someone who lives in a small apartment without a washing machine whether he tends to hoard quarters.
Ask HN: How do I get to that next level of traffic?
I run a social music website that is getting a steady stream of visitors (1,000) each day. We've been on the front page of Reddit (several times), featured in newspapers, blogs, podcasts etc. while these help us grow, our growth rate of active users isn't tremendously high. We have recently created a Facebook app to help spread the word about our site. Is there anything else that can be done to increase growth other than wait for positive word of mouth?
The cost of false positives is another, better test.

The cost of false negatives is grim.
It's not a bug at all, but then, no one said it was.

It's just a new type of malware: a firefox addon based malware. How it gets installed is a different question, but the takeway from the article is that it's now necessary to virus scan addons.
Actually, it is better to start a new job than to be worried about being layed off from the one you already have =D
Facebook Connect vs. OpenID: Who Will Emerge Victorious?
We called some, IMed others, Facebooked a few, Emailed the rest.
Also, a lot of the scripts that power Gnome and Debian are written in Python. Ubuntu also seems to do most new work in Python. So I expect Python 2.X to be the default in distros for quite some time, probably until a 3.1 release or later.
Ever wondered what the 'Free Public WiFi' networks you see everywhere are?
Ducking an iPhone Annoyance
Web 2.5 Code Terrorist - that is just so freakin' funny. How about coming up with similar programmer metaphors for job posts....

Looking for a Rails Black Magician who actually worships the Devil himself everyday before coming in to work to sell their soul to our start up in exchange for a crappy salary and some probably worthless 'stock options'. Perks include unlimited animals for use in ceremonial debugging sacrifices and root access for everyone. Login now and take a look at our servers - password PrinceOfDarkness. If you are truly an evil coding bastard send us your resume today!
And some recruiters are so bad that they steer candidates away from a position.

I know I've walked away from a potential job because the recruiter was so hard to deal with.
Well, if your site is technically solid and you aren't spending a ton of time writing the software any more, you should be spending your time talking about it every chance you get, everywhere you go.

You should start by putting your website in your profile at the very least.
What sort of a score on the normal GRE test would you say would be a very good score?

I understand the test is out of 1600 presently.
In Italy, it's pretty common, even at a busy line in a busy supermarket downtown in a big, busy city, for the cashier to stop and ask if you have exact change, or something close. And then wait while you fish around in your wallet and count it out. Not nearly so bad as what's described in the article, but annoying just the same.
The latest draft of Linux Standard Base appears to specify Python 2.4. I wish we could rely on everyone having ctypes and ElementTree in the standard library, but no luck.

(I think web.py 0.3 and possibly the trunk of Django can handle Py2.6, but obviously they're not going to drop support for older versions any time soon.)
Digg not for sale
Tipjoy (YC W08) now allows payments via Twitter
Friday and Saturday are the two nights per week that I go to bed early. I'm in bed by 9pm on Friday and not much later than 10 on Saturday.

Social scene is during the day. Saturday I spend playing rugby and hanging out with the club, no working. Sunday I have no-pressure brunch with my closest friends. Sunday afternoon I get a massage, and Sunday night is one of most productive coding sessions of the week - decompressing your brain for a couple days does amazing things.
I usually spend one evening at home with my girlfriend and the other evening going out with my girlfriend. We usually go out for dinner, or out with friends... Sometimes we just have dinner outside on the patio with a bottle of wine.
What hedge funds are hiring? I would love an internship with one
I have been seeing this at every airport I have been to. Now, I know. Thanks.
That's why most of these tests are made so that they give more false positives than false negatives. Something about the alpha value that I learned a long time ago in statistics.
The article is too dense and the font too tiny. Anyone have a two sentence synopsis?

However, I love the pixel art. We need more pixel art in this world!
EmotionML
This feels like something out of the onion.
Thanks to all for the kind words and thoughts. The calls to action are effective, more so if you really pour yourself into everything that proceeds - not writing a fluff piece, but offering something of real value. Treating the reader like they're already a customer.

I'm sure all of you already know this, but when I use the term white paper in the context of this post, it equally applies to case studies, guides, reports, etc. I use this tactic in all such doscuments I write and consistently find it effective.

Thanks Again!
Jim
Cybercrime toll threatens new financial crisis
Disco is a different beast. It's the synths that are mainstream not disco the genre. Synths were used by many other bands as well so I'm not sure what you mean by launched from gay clubs?
Wanted:

DHTML Rapist to demoralize and abuse Internet Explorer's layout and javascript bugs...
One tactic I use is to consider things which are 1000 times better than something which already exists. You don't have to invent something completely new, if you make something 1000 times better its uses will change in transformational ways.

It's easy to see these in retrospect, things like spreadsheet software, digital photography, digital publishing, and email are all a factor or 1000 or more better in some regard than what came before. Hanauer mentions getting "1,000 times the surveillance per dollar".

In Founders At Work the guy behind PayPal describes their fraud tools which were probably 100 to 1000 times better than what their fraud investigators were working with and allowed PayPal to survive when their competitors died.

I've been in academia for a long time so I often wonder how to make education 1000 times better. If that 1000 times better is 10 times faster and 100 times cheaper (questionable math I know) you'd be able to do college in 5 months for a few hundred dollars. I don't know how to do it, but it forces a different thought process.

It's relatively easy to make something 1000 times better that is only useful for one or two people in a particular situation, and the more people it is useful for the more money potential there is. A simple script has been 100 to 1000 times more efficient for me in some situations, but isn't useful for anyone else. 1000 times makes such a difference though that it is almost always worthwhile.
I start gathering women for my one man orgy at about 8pm and am good to go for the night with about six come 10pm.
Ask YC: Good resources for learning more about sales (startup)
Hi - as we make our transition from a startup focused fully on products to one concentrating on sales, just wondering if people had good resources for learning more about sales, sales strategies, cold-calling etc.

Great books or great websites anyone?
That's a cool thing to know, thanks. You could definitely do some viral marketing this way if you were more devious than I.
Ask HN: Options to Add Classifieds to Site?
What are the options to add classified ads to a website? Has anybody done this for web classified ad listings like Wufoo has for web forms? I would like to be able to charge per listing and have payment processing built into the platform.
Starwars style holographic 3DTV could be a reality by 2018
Great service, keep up the good work guys.
Big ups to chatterous, we can't live without it at my company.
It's a good debate. And even better test. It's something marketers should test and run with what gets the best result - most likely measured by lead quality, volume, and sales.
Wow, this really looks great guys. I tried chatterous before but this new release is a huge leap in usability. I find the workflow a lot more intuitive now.

Great job at iterating in the right direction. I am finding it really useful for group chats that I used to do by CC'ing a bunch of people.
I am curious as to what would count as "work". Would you consider building a financial library used for personal and academic purposes work?
It sounds like the problem isn't "getting enough traffic", it's getting people to stay, or to come back. Are you focusing on that?
They could be going for two different types of user:

A) Brand-new programmer or language nomad who wants to dive right into Python. It's for personal enrichment, so they might as well learn the latest dialect and not pick up archaic habits.

B) Wary/professional programmer, or someone who wants to get something else done and thought Python might do the trick. This is the user who will actually bother to stop and read the instructions on the download page, probably because something else they want to use says it requires Python. (Perhaps a library with skimpy documentation.) If it works right away, they'll keep using Python; if not, they'll probably blame Python as a whole instead of the particular version they downloaded and use some other language to solve their problem.

Anyone in charge of a real production system is presumably beyond the "I guess I'll try Python" stage and is able to find out exactly which version they need.
> This is incorrect. Lithium ion batteries do not exhibit memory.

I said chemistries - NiMH still exhibit a memory.

> However, the digital tools to check them can develop a memory

I think I mentioned that.
Someone told me it was the software from a 3G but this makes a lot more sense.

Interesting mistake.
I agree about the link. Maybe there was no link to avoid looking like a spammy-type post.
Harvard Hit by Loss as Crisis Spreads to Colleges
Same here. Nice work, guys.
We have started to focus on that, trying to get people more involved and giving them reasons to come back to the site. It is a weakness of ours at this point but something that is solvable.
Bella Luna is coming to the Brewery District of Jamaica Plain | The Boston Home Team Blog
I wrote a lot of white papers before I thought of it. It's so obvious, but I missed it for a long time. I "discovered" it accidentally while profiling white paper readers. I wrote all the things I'd like them to do after reading. Having them give the white papers to others was in the top two - calling the author was #1. It seemed like an easy request...the rest, as they say, is history :-)
I have a few theories and quick ideas on this..

For starters, are you partnering with any other companies? I think the synergy of having working relationships with other companies are a great asset since they will actively promote you while you promote them and so on.

Secondly, do you have any viral aspects / proposition for your site? I haven't seen it so I can't tell.. But if you positioned yourself such that a small niche group must have and use your site then I think that's a great start since the group will be self-replicated the newly spawned groups will self-replicate more, hence viral.

Thirdly, have you looked at the discoverability of your site? Look for patterns of how your users are finding you and how they are not.

Last, SEO is the hot term for these days and I think for a good reason. Imagine if I did a google search for something related to music and your social website always shows up as #1 / #2 in the search results? I have a lot of ideas on how this can be done.. but I guess I'll try it out on our stealthy startup first.. and if it works and we become widly successful then I will defintely blog and share about it. =).
Cut 'em some slack. They screwed up, hopefully they've learned their lesson, apparently they've found someone (so it doesn't look like they were hurt too badly), and the data they post here may help other startups find people.
How I Built a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Hours
Google Reader Gets a Major Makeover; It Rocks
Agent.btz
Can you share the site URL?
I don't play either WOW or the card game based on it, so I'm wondering, why would you play with cards over the online version?
I wonder who started it? Pretty amazing. I see it in every country I visit.
Not true, at least on the hiring freeze front. I just got an offer from them.
I don't know if anyone ever looked at my GPA. (It might be on my resume, and "they" might have filtered resumes with some hard GPA cutoff) It usually came down to my interviews and such I think.
It's such an apples-vs-oranges comparison, and it's also largely a personal choice. I do play the card game over the online game, though, regularly.

People who've played lots of Magic say that the WoW card game is a better game than Magic, for what it's worth.

EDIT: Oh, I misread your question. Why? Well, it's sort of like the difference between driving a car and riding a bike. A bike isn't a crappy car, it's fundamentally different, with its own set of strengths.

Also, the collectible card game is NOT a simulation or re-creation of the online game. It's more like Magic set in the WoW universe.
It was a slightly unnecessarily snarky comment, you're right -- the data actually wasn't too bad.
AHA! I looked into it a bit, psmtp is actually Postini, which Google bought. I assume they use psmtp for corporate accounts that need better um. something.

So blame postini perhaps ;)
Actually, he spent a big chunk of it before I could get it :(
making coins cost a lots of money (ironically), more than making notes... so, that is the problem
#11. Make friends at your current job-- as many as possible, preferably with some being "diagonal-up" (e.g. not your boss, but at a higher level). Bonus points if they are unlikely to be cut. You will need them as references if your boss gives you a bad one (which you should check 3-5 weeks after being laid off, using a professional ref-checking service).

Friends from the old company are not just potential references, but also possible co-founders or recruits at the new job.

#12. Move all your side projects onto off-work computers, and try to make sure that they're deleted from your work machines nightly and automatically. (Of course, this is not the time to do something moronic, so only delete true side projects, e.g. things that the company doesn't know or care about but that you still need to unambiguously own for future purposes.)

#13. This one applies mainly to large companies. In good economic times, you want to make yourself as replaceable and obsolete as possible (write well-documented, easy-to-follow code) so you can move on to more interesting projects and, if laid off, leave on good terms to a better job. In bad economic times, try to make yourself irreplaceable, even if that means making your code difficult to use. If you feel the need to be unethical, you can hide time-delay bugs. At worst, you'll be asked to train someone else in the technology and offered a severance package in order to do it, which is better than being let go cold.
Intentionally infecting people with SSIDs is illegal. You have to notify your ad-hoc partner.
I'm a little unclear on one point: knowing that 3ms * 186000 miles/sec is roughly 550 miles, wouldn't the radius be ~275 miles? (Round trip travel time before timeout)

That is assuming that packets could actually travel that fast through a wire.
FYI roberte3-

Found this in the FAQ of http://sixhourstartup.com
"frequently the best results come from the .NET developer who tries his hand at writing web copy, or from the marketer who’s never done any marketing before."

A marketer who's never done marketing before! Impressive!

:)
Was it a crisis when they got inflated returns in the first place? Or is only the correction a crisis?
Tis summer, the middle east meets the far east in an epic battle for the west! WEB 2.5: Ninjas vs Terrorists The movie!
His initial suspision was the same thought I had. Interesting.
Penguin Animation
Well this is not about cars, it is about programming languages.
Beg PG: programming sub-section on News.YC?
I'm a long time news.yc user and I love the quality of discussions here.

But everything good deserves to get even better. I want to beg PG to introduce a programming/hacking subsection on news.yc

I'd love to see programming/reddit quality of submissions coupled with news.yc quality of commenters without a heavy dose of daily "how to get rich and lose fat" submissions that occupy most of the front page.

I truly hope I'm not alone here.
Still, is VB really competing with Perl?
Canadian leader suspends Parliament to stay in power
I take it you missed the Yelp party yesterday?
What about apps for the iPhone and Android?
I deployed one project by creating a completely separate deployment area, /opt/projectname, which contains a separate tree, /opt/projectname/sw, where I manually compiled all the dependencies: ./configure --prefix=/opt/projectname/sw. I installed ruby and gems in there, as well as the specific version of Apache I wanted to use. On the downside, it means that managing upgrades comes problematic, as I have only isolated the bin/lib/etc/share mess into a separate tree, not eliminated it.

To make life easier, though, I'd like to use an alternative source-based package manager. I'm not sure how to do this, but I'd like to run the './configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install' invocation in an environment which tracks the files copied by the install process, and knows which files in the system my packages affected. At this point, it would (ideally) update the .deb database on the system. It could (alternatively) keep track of these files in its own database. Maybe a chroot trick could help implement this.
Isn't that expensive? Do you go by yourself or others? The one near me is inside a big sports store and no one is ever using the wall. I feel like all the shoppers would stare at me if I climbed there.
why oh why can't Stamford, CT have stuff like that?!
You do have a point there. first of all, I work with Auston, the one who posted this threat. I think that making the decision to join a company has to do more with the people and vision of the company I'm interviewing with. At the same time I think it would be nice to show them my skill set. I'm have been a consultant for a long time now and there have been times when I didn't want to do business with the other company after the initial meeting and other times where I had to proof myself to the company before we could have a deal together. I think we approached the interviews pretty good. We set up a very relax atmosphere and talk about more than just programming and skill stuff.
As a Canadian, I say this: NOT HN.
we were thinking about that to get it out in time for Christmas. Do you think these apps would help us gain traffic or just give our existing users another way to interact with the site?
I wish I had the link for you now, but I read an article at one point by a guy who made those websites that get you to opt-in to a horoscope subscrption to your phone.

His finidings through testing were that when he requested a zip code up front, his initial click-through rates were lower, but his response rates on the back end were much higher. It turned out that people who gave a little information up front were much more likely to give a lot more later on. It really boils down to trust.
You're right. I remember when those movies came out. Even 1991's "Don't tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead" follows that pattern.

Ironically, Tron was this way also. Flynn sought to run the big tech corporation instead of that arcade. Now, I'd rather be running that arcade than working for the big corporation.
In some ways, building the product is the easy part. Getting traction is the really dicey problem.

Check out some of the SEO/SEM sites like seomoz. SEO is very important. Link-building is also important. Look at getting some reciprocal links or at focusing on a specific niche within your site and really trying to develop a core audience around a few musicians/genres in order to get that "critical mass" of interest. Contact other sites in your space and figure out how you can get them to write about and/or drive audience to you. Hold contests. Build widgets. There's no silver bullet (for most of us).

Knowing the type of user that is attracted to your site is also very important. That will really help you narrow down what kinds of sites and techniques you should be using to capture more audience. Do you have a lot of kids on your site? If so, seek out affinity sites. It will be much easier for you to convert that audience to your product. Use sites like Quantcast to discover sites like yours that have traffic. Learn from the successful sites and employ their tricks (are you asking every user to invite their friends when they sign up? if not, you might be missing out on new users).

And, as always, be patient. My website is a little more than 2 years old and we've gone from 1000 visitors/day to 100k+/day. And even now it's still one of my primary tasks every day (figuring out new ways to get word out and encourage inbound traffic). You should be spending several hours a day working on this stuff.
Turn Based Game API Targeted at Mobile Devices
Smibs Enters Public Beta
You do know that this is not how TCP works, right?

It's not that a node "says how many packets they want to send", and the endpoint decides how many they are going to consume.

In reality, each node just sends the packet and waits for the ACK from the other endpoint. So, if A has 1000 packets, it's going to try to send them, all of them. So will B and C.

The problem is, if the endpoint is only able to handle 1000 packets per unit of time, some of them will be dropped. But there is no way for an endpoint to say "Oh, A is clogging the pipe, I'll drop from it". The endpoint just gets what it can and ACKs.

As the article makes pretty clear, the problem is not bandwidth, it's congestion volume.
The first thing to do is at least tell us your link here in HN, please.
this was kind of well-publicized a while ago. thought it was common knowledge.

interesting case study of actual virality. i see two FPW's on my list right now.