skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hardly git exclusively; most any modern version control works well for this. Git's local branching/checkout makes it a slightly faster process though, I suppose.
Virtual going out is the new going out
I thought I remembered the 'amb' operator sounded similar. It is discussed in "Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days." From chap 14 ( http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/languages/scheme/tutorial-dsitaram/t-... )

`amb` takes zero or more expressions, and makes a
nondeterministic (or ``ambiguous'') choice among them,
preferring those choices that cause the program to
converge meaningfully. Here we will explore an embedding
of amb in Scheme that makes a depth-first selection of
the ambiguous choices, and uses Scheme's control operator
call/cc to backtrack for alternate choices.
Benchmarking DB2 pureXML against 1 TB of XML data
it seems to me that a PC that is capable of running Linux AND Windows is more free than a PC that is only capable of running Linux

That's like saying a society where some people are free and some people are slaves is more free than a society where everyone is free.

I understand the concern of making Windows available to children, but in the end, it is better than no PC at all.

If it was a choice between a PC running Windows or no PC at all, ever for the rest of someone's life, then I'd agree. But as Stallman says "Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco."
Comcast Looks Strong
pdf here: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2008001_worlds.pdf

Originally posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=338271
I'm not a fan girl of Comcast. Personally, I dislike their customer service and that DVR archaic box. It is surprising to me, that I, like so many have some how bought into the need to pay for their services.
Stock market manipulation for whatever reason can cause lots of problems for other people. At times like this it can cause a market panic. Just because you have more money doesn't mean you should be able to fix prices. That's why entities who own more than 5% of a stock are restricted in what they can do (in US).
Blogs generally are on a niche subject. Digg and reddit are aggregators not blogs. If something is a niche then it is a niche. Why are you expecting lots of traffic?
that's right: we are no only destroying our environment, we are also destroying the parts of our environment that can help us not to destroy it. Efficiency, thy name is man.
TV-B-Gone: Not Your Average Open Source Success Story
FCC approves Sprint-Clearwire WiMax deal
Obama Or McCain Polls: The iPhone app that will last a day
SEO, blog carnivals, finding other blogs on similar topics and doing comments. Most of the standard advice for building traffic.
The Laptop Celebrates 40 Years
“The debate about whether we should have income tax or not is somewhat moot outside of armed rebellion” I hope this is not true, I’d prefer a peaceful solution. I believe all things are possible, perhaps it is not possible because people think it is not. Even if you want it low, the best strategy may be to urge for abolishment, and the chances of getting low taxes go up. I was for low taxes, now I’m for abolishment. The more I learn about the system being rigged, the more I want it absolutely.
Virgina uses 18 voting systems from 11 companies
I can't help but wonder what back room deals lead to this.
Ask HN: So, how did the recent PR advice work for you?
Following on from the two recent topics on HN,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351709

How has the advice given in those two threads worked out for you?

I've been promoting one of my apps (http://www.whos-playing.com) on relevant Facebook groups, I also submitted it to Stumbleupon and I've been pushing it out to blogs & podcasts.

I've had little or no traffic from Facebook, Stumbleupon gave a good spike the day I submitted it, but since then not a single referral.

There's a little bit of interest from blogs & podcasts, but no actual coverage yet, however I admit this is an area that needs more work on my part.

There's more I can do on Facebook, and the blogs, but how as the advice you got from HN helped promote your app?
Clever but utterly unappealing as far as logos go.
You can't see what you do not believe. That's just your hardware limitation. If there's no logical model for something your perception will filter it out. If you can read this you probably knew it already.
It looks like the rain is causing the most problems with optical scanner systems. So, I guess having many options on election day is probably a useful approach.
Its not just expansion packs. EQ had expansion packs, and I'm sure other MMO's did as well.

WoW has been _vastly_ improved by Blizzard over the last couple of years, and it was a pretty damn good game to start with. They really have just polished and polished their product.
You're awfully optimistic. Who says that a fungus that makes diesel fuel won't just encourage people to chop down more rainforest so they can make diesel fuel out of it?
You know, I just realized "agile" programming is a bit like the scientific method: you make experiments to see what works and what doesn't and then you base your mental models on that. So I guess "agile" programming puts a bit of the "science" back into "computer science".
I'd like to hear the other side of the story as well. I certainly hope it's not true.

As a developer I'm worried that these open web platforms are not so open. I worry that my data will be hijacked, that my apps will be locked to one vendor, that my provider might be my main competitor.
My mom can't use it, because she's on a corporate network that requires Internet Explorer. She's none too pleased.

A lot of people use IE because they can't help it. Then they think that using two web browsers in two places is too much trouble. I can't wait until corporations and schools switch away from IE entirely.
This might help:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/firefox_internet_explorer/s...
Running Windows is not the same as being a slave.

In fact, why not dig deeper. Is the CPU Open Source? Why is it not a problem to use proprietary hardware?

Actually, Windows does not even have that much of a lock-in, or does it? The lock in used to stem from MS Office, and even that is not so severe anymore these days.

And I think for those children it was a question between no PC or a Windows PC. If for whatever reason the government or whoever pays for the PCs says so, what do you want to do against it?
Just because they benefit doesn't mean we don't too. Perhaps if reducing waste created more frustration for the user you could attack Amazon's motives, but it actually helps everyone. There is not a single reason for Amazon not to go forward with this, and I'm sure they're happy it helps their customers even as it helps their bottom line.
O/R?
OK, I suppose it's probably for the best if you don't vote.
Christ I haven't even had the chance to finish jumping on the rSpec bandwagon and now it's time to get off?

I must be getting old I can't keep up. :)
Google Search Appliance virtual edition
How do you do profit-sharing to encourage user contributions in a web 2.0 site?
Is there something as simple as adsense that can be used to reward users for their contributions to your site?
You can sell time cards for in game cash in eve online. You can also trade charters between accounts in eve.

At the same time there seems to be a lot of gold farmers in the game.

I think everquest opened a server where you could buy cash but there are few high end items you can get by spending gold in that game.
Cool - thanks for posting this.Sorry that I didn't see your posting.

I think it contains interesting thoughts regarding what characteristics make a startup Advisor effective.
The most effective way to drive traffic to a new blog is to write consistent, targeted and high quality content (keep your posts on-topic, especially early on), and to get to know the other people in the niche (they're not competition, but fellow members of a community). I really don't believe there are any other ways to attract high quality traffic.

That said, I'd really recommend that you step back and figure out an agenda for your blog. Are you trying to educate readers? Learn by writing? Develop a reputation as a competent programmer or as a member of a community? If you go into blogging aiming at pageviews, you run the risk of writing junk simply because it appeals to readers from Reddit or Digg, but doesn't accomplish anything positive for your personal brand.
Custom C-functions Executed in a Single CPU Cycle (For Use in Embedded Systems)
Start slow, and take advantage of your time without readers to find your voice and figure out what works and what doesn't. Once you get that figured out, just do all the standard stuff. Here's a good list: http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2008/10/how-to-launc...
Calling Apple out - Make dev material free.
I'm a windows developer and I'd just like to call out the recent evilness coming from Apple. I received an email encouraging me to watch the WWDC08 session videos. I excitedly clicked the link^ where they attempted to charge me for the video sessions.

Microsoft doesn't charge for this type of material now-a-days and I was expecting the same from Apple. Big conferences like the PDC2008 are free^^. And of course there are plenty of free conference materials in other domains (Java, python and ruby).

So what's up with Apple being evil recently? It's been my opinion that one of the few things Microsoft does right is keeping it's developers happy. I would think this would be common sense to a company like Apple.

Has anyone spent 500-1000 to buy the WWDC sessions and was it worth it? Is it that different from material like PDC2008 that it's worth 500-1000 bucks?

^ http://developer.apple.com/products/video/wwdc08/index.html

^^ https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/timeline.aspx
I read non-fiction related to business strategy, sociology, economics, and technology constantly. In fact I went down the the LA public library and picked up 10 stellar titles just this weekend, I highly recommend all of these:

- Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software [MIT]
- Prisoner's Dilemma [William Poundstone]
- Thinking Strategically [Nalebuff]
- Co-opetition [Nalebuff]
- Cluetrain Manifesto [Searls]
- Open Sources 2.0 [O'Reilly]
- Innovator's Dilemma [Christensen]
- Net Worth [Hagel]
- Democratizing Innovation [von Hippel]
- Fooled by Randomness [Taleb]

Other books I always keep around are "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" (a history of DJ's and electronic music), The Singularity is Near, and some Calvin and Hobbes ;-)

All the reading is most definitely worth it, if you don't feel that way you're not reading the right stuff.

The best book I've ever read is probably Anna Karenina (Magarshack translation, not the Oprah version, which is ironically much drier). Other very influential books on me include The Wealth of Networks, Shaping Things, and Free Culture. In fact, all 3 of those were given to me at different times in my life by the smartest person I know (a family friend of my parents)

Maybe the key to the non-fiction reading is having an agenda. I always feel like I'm downloading knowledge that is going to help me make bank and/or help people so that keeps me riveted (beyond the intellectual stimulation, which I'm a total whore for, too ;-)
I totally disagree with this! It isn't a fault of the curriculum, it's the fault of your teachers. I had my entire HS/college education in India. And if I may say so, I would put myself in the "exceptional" category as well: I was in the international math olympiad, and rarely scored less than 100% in school tests.

Anyway, I found the math classes thoroughly enjoyable. The teachers pretty much let me do whatever I wanted as long as I didn't disrupt the class. I'd usually be a few chapters ahead, or helping out the kid next to me, or something like that. Very often, the curriculum was challenging even for me. We had Fermat's infinite descent in the eighth grade! I distinctly remember ruler and compass construction problems in my ninth grade that I'd have great trouble solving even now.

The good thing was, the super-hard parts that I've mentioned were all optional and were never on the exams. It worked out perfectly -- students who were both smarter than average and self-motivated would spend most of our time on those parts. My teachers were happy to answer my questions about that stuff after class, even though it was irrelevant as far as our grades were concerned.

One teacher in particular was amazing. She rewarded outside-the-box thinking, and if there was more than one way to solve a problem, she let us present them all. She acknowledged when she was wrong. Damn, writing this has made me all nostalgic and want to find her and thank her :-)

One time, I was working through a textbook that was two or three grade levels ahead. I had a question that she couldn't answer right away. She went home, did her research, and helped me out the next day. How awesome is that?

We had one horrendously bad teacher. They fired her after two months.

Some other great memories.. we all learned to program in the fifth grade. That was tons of fun. A computer cost more than a building back then in India :-) Vector calculus in the ninth grade. And so on.

Of course, everything except math and science was a disaster, but there's no way there was anything wrong with the math curriculum. I'm quite aware that 90% of my friends at other schools had completely unmotivated teachers, but again, not a fault of the curriculum.
Write 20 lines of code, ride the hype/sentiments, make some quick bucks and move on ...
What's this app going to prove or disprove? How close is the result of this app going to be to the real one? Is there any justification behind spending that 99¢?
I read Mann's "Doctor Faustus" and it was SO rich...every sentence needs to be read 2x to be internalized. 2400 pages of Mann sounds insane!

;-)

(thanks for the tip, I'll try and peep the preface at least)
Show, don't tell. If you can't show, tell a story. Easier said than done!
surely you mean "cracker".
Good how to on finding advisors who are not "advisors".
FCC approves 'white spaces' spectrum usage for 'wi-fi on steroids'
Why take the effort to chop down trees to make fuel when we already produce enough cellulose from crops (corn stalks, sawdust etc) to make a lot of biofuel? It would be more cost effective to use sawdust from wood mills, corn stalks, etc (things normally seen as waste materials) to make fuel than it would be to go out and chop down trees. Not only would you have to expend a lot of energy to chop down the trees and transport them, but you would have to process them into a more usable form. I doubt it would work well to simply coat an entire tree with a fungus and wait for it to be decomposed. You would want to grind the tree up into smaller bits to increase the surface area the fungus has to grow on .
Not that I know of, sounds like a business idea though.
Oil may no longer be a fossil fuel!

Now we can all stop feeling guilty.

At the same time though, carbon sequestration becomes crucial (assuming this organism's ability to make crude begins to be used commercially).

Oh, and don't forget about tighter emission standards, among other things.
This is the kind of article that makes me wish programmers studied creative writing or fine art or film making more often. I did a lot of creative writing in college and beyond, and the spectrum for what works is exceptionally wide. Some people are paralyzed without an extremely detailed outline and keep almost everything the write, while other people fill hundreds of pages with no planning and slowly filter out the words, expecting nothing more than a few dozen usable pages.

Software is usually more collaborative than writing, so it's not quite the same thing... but in the end, maybe we shouldn't be surprised when talented people end up producing great things with almost contradictory approaches, and when talented people using similar approaches often produce great results and total catastrophes.

Programming is still mainly art, after all. The only thing that really matters is that you actually do it, and you finish it. There was the advice I read: "you have to write, you have to finish what you write, and you have to publish what you write."
I...believe you’re either pro life or pro death.

Bleh. Black and white thinking. Bleh.
I believe Leo Laporte sits on a ball all day when doing all those podcasts and twit live shows he does ... I don't get it - how does it help your posture? Can you not sit slouched over on a ball as easy as a normal chair? Maybe I should try this ball thing!
FCC approves use of "white spaces"
It will mean free fisticuffs.
Favorites UI Design
agree. high quality comments on related blogs can be very effective. and it can't hurt to define 'related' broadly.
I am an avid reader myself, but it is hard to find free time. I mostly read technical books these days, currently Cocoa Programmers for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass, excellent book. Other days when I do have a spear 5 mins I usually go the www.slapastory.com (sorry for the plug). Its one of my little startups.
A Revolution for Students: The Startup Story of Unigo.com
Have great content, comment on other blogs, and link to other blogs, so they will link to you.
Assuming you have sawdust and corn stalks. If you're in a part of the world where rainforest is more plentiful than either of those, and you're chopping it down anyway to make farmland...
That's because the submission title is misleading (the blog post says nothing about "reverse engineering" anything.)

Here is what flickr actually did:

"Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can."

So yes, they're just tracing around the points in their database to see what kind of shapes they will get, for the experiment of seeing how well they could represent a given (country, state, town) by connecting coordinates of photos taken closest to the real borders of those actual regions.
who the "cool kids" are is a very shallow measurement of social expectation. As little as kids claim to value the respect of their elders, expectations do play a large role in what is valued.
exactly. humans are adaptation executers, not fitness maximizers. we are adapted to measure the metric of success by physical prowess because in the environment we evolved in that WAS the most important metric for success. Our monkey brains can not wrap our heads around the idea that something like sitting in a class room playing with numbers would be a better predictor of success.
add porn, good porn at that. Everybody loves sex, if you've got a good blog about lets say Knitting, throw some good porn in there because lets face it, who doesn't love browsing their favorite knitting blog with a little porn on the side! Exactly!
I've been interesed in this as a way to safely modify core JavaScript prototypes.
I think he was too pilled up in the end to care. an easy vice to fall prey to.
But given the chance, yes, I would start a cult and take money from morons for my own luxury.
The ad execs at Guinness would be dancing a jig if they saw this.
Hmm, from some brief research it does seem a bit of a gray area.

I guess the part that makes me think it would be OK would be the lack of "consideration" involved in playing (You're not required to pay or buy anything to play and there's no potential to lose money).

Just for reference: http://www.ago.state.co.us/FAQ/illegal_gambling_FAQ.cfm.html

"For example, if the consideration component is eliminated and no fee, buy-in or other money is required or solicited from the participants in a poker tournament, then prizes may be awarded to the player(s) who perform well in the tournament."

IANAL so take any of this with a salt mine worth of salt :)
we might be on the verge of another party renaming that has occurred at various times in american history. the old conservative party slowly dies and the liberal party bifurcates into two new parties, one more conservative and one more extremely liberal.
Apparently the colour of freedom is all khaki greens, repressive greys, and midnight blues:

http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php?search_term=f...

I wanted to search for the colour of Obama, but realised that would be racist.
it didn't work like this in SimCity.
FCC gives Verizon/Alltel buyout the greenlight
Mapping The Scenarios: Geo Resources For The Election
Image Caption Design: Simply Elegant or Boldly Graphic?
"When people ask me about my life's ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that's about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement."

I say the same thing except I'm serious.
"So what's up with Apple being evil recently?"

The WWDC videos are nothing new and Apple has charged for them for the last couple of years, if not longer.
Still trying to get my children to switch.
It would invade people's privacy. You don't want people to know if you have voted or not and when.
Big good news for startups.
Dell Sees Future in Services
It's hard to sum it up in one word -- as an American raised in Australia, and finally living here again, it's an amazing feeling to be a part of the process.
I call the the "imagination gap".

When I was giving advice about the fbFund I had a number of queries about whether the applicants should build prototypes or film screencasts or just spend time writing their proposal.

My advice was always to do whatever it took to minimize the imagination gap. Figure out what shows off the idea in as concrete a form as possible. It is hard work to extrapolate in a way that is identical to the person with the original idea. Make it as easy as possible.
Charging money != evil

Nevertheless, I agree that asking people to pay for this kind of material is going to get them nowhere. If you want developers to develop for your platform, shutting the door on a large proportion of them is not the way to achieve that.
Can you come to my next party?
for those of you for whom it doesn't work, it seems like the site is extremely slow. I'm on fios and it took like 3 minutes to do the search.
Shameless plug, but why not go the widget route? Widgetbox.com has channels that are used to link different blogs together, but that may not fit your niche requirement. People love to see relevant content, so extending your reach by creating a widget and allowing those that are interested in it to grab and spread your voice is by far the best way.

Look around for other energetic web users that think like you (you're just in a niche and not something completely unqiue, correct?) and network yourselves together. Also, driving traffic to each other increases SEO and overall awareness on the web with minimal effort.
I agree. Apple hasn't done anything new. While the rest of the industry has noticeably opened up.
I take another approach: Never, ever look at my parents' computer. Last time I did I nearly puked on the monitor. I think they're still rockin' the Bonzai Buddy.
It's always easy to blame the user, but without a complete mental model, they have no idea why they're getting these warnings, and they've gotten them enough in the past (try going to https://paypal.com/) that they think they aren't significant.

This is a usability failing, pure and simple.
If the World Could Vote
The Bradley effect is a myth. Like Truman v Dewey and the exit poll controversies in 2000 and 2004, the Bradley effect presupposes that the polling was accurate. In each case, it's apparent from the historical evidence that unreliable polling was the culprit. Just look at how much variation there is in the polls this election - the most heavily polled yet. A gubernatorial campaign twenty-five years ago can't even compare.