skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, here's my own successful attempt at giving up caffeine:
http://www.bricolagelabs.com/experiments/3-quitting-caffeine

It has day-by-day descriptions of symptoms etc. I was back to normal faster than expected, but I used certain strategies to help get there.
I suppose the removal of Podcaster is now explained by the new ability to download podcasts from iTunes. Podcaster would essentially be killed by now but why didn't they let the developer sell his app for a couple of months? It sounds like it would have been good for everybody.

Good update though!
True, but I also have to wonder how big a deal an "unprofitable" brand is. If the brand was genuinely unprofitable, wouldn't the problem dealers eventually go out of business?

And how much does it actually cost to keep a brand alive? Can't GM just slap a Buick label on a Cadillac and ship however many of each are needed?
"For example, however the industry shakes out, automakers must be liberated from CAFE fuel economy laws that arbitrarily dictate what kind of cars they must sell, forcing them to sell millions of small cars that have no chance of profitability given consumer preferences."

Right, because clearly what's killing the big three is not enough SUVs.
Logo Design Companies Reviewed And Compared
Let’s us not forget that beyond the comment/apology, post, upvote and downvote a life has been lost. We should all show respect as human being not just actors behind our keyboard.

It is sad when a young person die for no good reason; it calls for a more serious debate around the question: why?
How am I taking tidbits of your words and making them into a story that I want? I simply called you out on exactly what you said, both your facts and your angry, self-righteous tone.

You said your father has put you through college and has retired after 25 years. Presuming he started working at 25, we have him retiring at what, 50? Who pays for their kids' college and retires at 50? Investment bankers and plastic surgeons, that's who. The rest of the country works well into old age (most without adequate health insurance) and has their kids taking on student loans.

You opened your comment with anger, talking about your disgust, accusing crabapple of over-generalization and ignorance, and essentially dismissing all of us as moneybags who use hypothetical Denny's waitresses to degrade your family or ignore your hardship. (Read: shut up and fork over the money - or, pardon me, you stated that you are as of yet undecided whether it would benefit your family, so I guess we'll just sit tight and wait for your decision.)

You accuse me of zeal and psycho-analyze my anger but I am just reacting to the broad-daylight robbery that is taking place. People like you think that if they make a lot of noise and talk about their dads working their asses of for x number of years, we'll all get misty eyed and just hand over our money.

You are now getting a dose of your own medicine. I take your dad's 2-hour commute and raise you mine's World War II. Ridiculous, isn't it. When auto workers and their families stop blanketing the internet with their sob stories, we'll stop commenting on them. Over.
"Once you're broadcasting the fact that you're thinking about suicide on the net, it's only a matter of time."

Do you really think that every time someone talks about suicide on the internet that they are actually serious? Or even most of the time? Certainly I agree that a better support structure is needed, but talking about suicide on the internet may not necessarily be as much of a warning sign as you seem to think (a study on this would probably be reasonably insightful to the matter).
You can always revert back to the old theme, though I have to admit, their default theme was a bit caustic to the eyes.

On second thought, maybe it's like that to encourage people to look for where they can change the themes.
Good points, all of 'em!

Certainly it works (for both Google and the many people who advertise). But that doesn't mean it works for EVERYONE. I'm sure there are things you could sell/offer that adwords would be a total bust for. I was/am concerned about SaaS/SMB software like RescueTime underperforming compared to, say, lamps or Wiis.
Nice to see that the http://bikeshed.com/ is alive and well.
The page seems covered in flashing scumware ads - to be avoided I think.
Well, if you sit and watch them tying the noose and climb the tree, there is (or certainly can be argued) an element of fault that yes.
As I understood it, the search results that you change are only local to you. Other people don't really see them.

Because of that, I think Google can encourage the behavior where people are sending links relevant to themselves up to the their front page in an honest way. If they click things up that have no relevance to themselves, they only screw up their own searches.

So if you have millions of people sending things relevant to themselves up the list, Google is basically gathering data about what the human 'gold standard' for a particular search query is (augmented by machine sorting first).

In information retrieval, one of the hard things is to know whether you've done a better job of returning search results or not, since a gold standard dataset is hard to come by and time consuming to produce.

Here, I think Google is simply using a mechanism where they're aligning people's self-interest to create accurate data they can use to compare their search algorithm tweaks.

All in all, a good thing. Even better if you can 'merge' search results from others that you trust..say your friends. I wouldn't mind merging my search results with _why's. More complexity that way, though.
How I quit Caffeine (with limited impact to productivity)
It's pretty hard to believe you've been using Python seriously since 2002/2003 and had never heard of list comprehensions. They are a pretty big staple of most Python programmers.
What a creative way to diss.
If your dark humor doesn't offend people, you're doing it wrong. But you're right, this may show that HN overreacts.
I wonder these things, too, but don't really think I want to know: his enigmatic presence is part of the fun
Was anyone in the media objective and professional? You mention sensitive and sensationalist... I would hope there would be something in between.
agreed. interesting story, but i'd rather read it on a more reputable site.
As somebody who did lots of Perl for many years, spare yourself the pain, and do Python.

That said, Ruby is still my 'favorite' language -- it's just so much fun to code. But the libraries, and frankly horrible interpreter, have caused me to chuck it out the window for my company. The speed actually isn't the big problem -- it's the long-term maintainability and flexibility.
What you said may have been "inappropriate," but it was dark humor. Of course people would be offended.

I wholly agree. All it does is breed political correctness where there was none.
True - that's more or less what the UK car industry did during it's death throws. You could buy the same car with different logos on it - people even argued about which one was better. In fact they were prettywell all dreadful - and now all gone.
One could also say that his original comment didn't properly reflect him or his business, so he's just trying to set the record straight.

There's nothing wrong with that.
I think the idea that a simple drug is going to be the elixir of youth is mistaken. As we age a large number of things all fail around the same time so there is no single root cause. There are plenty of things that can extend the average lifespan, but 2000 years ago a tiny fraction of people lived to be 100 and today more people live about that long but not much longer.
I found that quitting caffeine was pretty easy. But replacing it with pure heroin was probably a bad move, as that was a bitch of a habit to kick.
Ask HN: Between PHP and Python, which one is better for web programming purpose?
I've a decent knowledge in JavaScript. Now I want to do a more serious web programming. I want to learn both PHP and Python. In your opinion:

1) Which one should I learn first? PHP or Python?
2) Which language has a better prospect in terms of web programming?
There's a karma minimum for downvoting.
it just seems to me that he's trying to re-evolution something that has already evolved.

i'm just saying, evolving further is more attractive than declaring this lineage a failure and going back to knuckledragging. it feels like when these a-hole anarchists think society would be better off if everyone had to defend their property with shotguns instead of having the system of law enforcement and crime-science we have now.
Another alternative that's straight from GOOG: http://www.google.com/notebook/
Well, I meant it more that nobody will really take an anonymous profile seriously here, unlike other sites.
Linus Torvalds’ old company acquired and gone
Hahahaha, I like the profile update.
This seems to be the where the article has been copy-and-pasted from:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372084
how big was it?
This is another stab at how to recognise programming talent, but this one is fairly confused and a bit rambling, and makes some silly points like suggesting that someone like Linus Torvalds would struggle in a java interview.

Without any self-promotion involved, I have to say I prefer my take on the subject... (available at http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good... ).
But we're not talking about some tiny community where everyone can be watching for this sort of thing from everyone else. What we're talking about is approximately the moral equivalent of blaming the mayor of New York for someone hanging themselves in Central Park.
As I said before, it’s about time for Yahoo to cut off projects that burdens the company out of the real scope: Search. Yahoo and Google are both search engines company, no matter what people think these giant cannot survive without search revenues.

The war zone with Google is search. Yahoo needs to innovate, as someone suggested here Yahoo need a rockstar like Steve Jobs, someone that can attract attention to the company with his fresh look at things and conquer back the lost users.
A VC: Getting a piece of my action
Reading that article made me expect a future in which a musician will not be known for a particular composition, but for the algorithm he devised for creating music of a particular flavor.

This only goes to show that eventually, all fields of knowledge will be nothing except mathematics!
Simon Peyton Jones on Mainstream Programming Languages
Space educator Randy Atwood says "no bigger than a grapefruit".
The ultimate phone: Pomegranatephone
And then there are the cases where two people of different skillsets can each see each others faults with painful clarity and fail to understand each others virtues.

I've seen more workplace strife start that way...
Why you should be in the valley if you’re a tech entrepreneur
Of course. They can't make money directly off of Ruby. Neither can EY or 37signals. For that matter, Sun doesn't directly make money off of Java either. And Microsoft doesn't make a lot of money from .Net (it's arguable over whether you'd consider visual studio sales directly attributable to .Net.)

The point here is that for EY, Sun, and MS their platforms are loss leaders for very profitable goods and services. And if those companies are paying people to work on Ruby for their platforms, that means they're betting that Ruby support will lead to greater platform adoption, which then leads to greater server sales.
This version omits it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_preprocessor#Multiple_evaluat...

It's pretty baffling, what's the point of checking the addresses-of for equality, and then casting it to void without assignment? It's not like it could throw an exception or anything :) The compiler would just optimize it out, so it must be there solely to cause compiler warnings, but I can't figure out any cases that it covers and the final statement does not.
The answer to your first question is Python. It's a better language hands down, and you'll be a better programmer for knowing it.

Now, I'm not a language zealot so I'll answer your second question a little differently. It really depends on how you define "web programming". If your goal is to hack together a few scripts for standard websites, PHP is a nice easy language that you can learn quickly. If you're more interested in web applications, python will be the better choice for you in the long run.
As it stands right now, he seems to have recovered all that and much more, between the apology article, his voted-up comments on it, and people gradually undoing the massive downmods on the original comments. The apology has been modded higher than the original article.

From a strictly theoretic standpoint, it seems the karma system rewards drama... and it also rewards posting controversial statements as separate articles rather than as comments, because articles can't get downmodded.

As interesting as the whole incident has been, I'm hoping we don't see many similar ones, since I don't think it really added much to the quality of discussion.
Motorola VE75 black Unlocked
It also has Bluetooth connectivity to let you connect a headset to the phone and then use it wirelessly. If you want to shoot best pictures, the Motorola VE75 black (Unlocked) will help you with its dynamic 1.3 megapixel camera.
College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts
Magic and the Brain: How Magicians Trick the Mind
Feel free to crack jokes at the next funeral you attend then. I'm sure the other attendees will be highly amused.

More to the heart of much great humour is timing.
It was new, it was unmistakably "Chopin-like" in spirit, and it did not feel emotionally empty. I was truly shaken. How could emotional music be coming out of a program that had never heard a note, never lived a moment of life, never had any emotions whatsoever?

Most emotions don't come directly from music, they come from a listener's interpretation of it. It's not romantic at all. There's nothing magical about music, it's just an abstract way for people to communicate. Composers might pour their emotion into a piece but if no one understands then people won't think it's emotional. And obviously, as he discovered with EMI, simply knowing the psychological tricks a computer program can generate music that does evoke emotion.
They will both get the job done. PHP isn't exactly pretty but it's easy to learn and get up and running with. Python can also be learned fairly quickly but it might be a steeper learning curve getting your development and production environments set up properly. I would definitely give the edge to Python since it's much more general purpose than PHP is. You may not always want to do just web programming.
Thanks for this. That's the funniest site I've seen in a while.
IPhone 2.2 firmware update available now, Google Street View and plenty more
For someone that has only had an account for an hour (!), you sure have a lot of thoughts on how the site works.

Consider this -- voting makes the articles about car companies have 84 upvotes instead of 85. Making a comment (or "whining", as you call it) can influence others to not vote-up the articles about car companies, and it can encourage others to submit better articles. So there is good reason to "whine" instead of silently not clicking the upvote button.
Interesting that the two Indian faces there seem to be at the same location (look at the window pane tiling; one of those ubiquitous Indian internet cafes perhaps? Or a turk farm!?).
Also, they look Malayali (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayali), but I could be wrong. It wouldn't be surprising if they were though. Kerala, the state from which they hail, has the highest literacy rate in the country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala
Disney Fights Pirates at China Affiliate
But we're not talking about some tiny community where everyone can be watching for this sort of thing from everyone else.

Well I know, but a lawyer can easily argue that community website operators have a duty to monitor their community for suicides the same way that they monitor for all sorts of other things. (I'm sure if I posted a racist rant it would be dealt with harshly.)

What we're talking about is approximately the moral equivalent of blaming the mayor of New York for someone hanging themselves in Central Park.

I tend to agree with you, but you should also realize that many cities have invested a great deal of money in anti-suicide devices - precisely because they recognize that they could be held liable, and because it's just a nice thing to do.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, so don't take this as my particular viewpoint.
Is HackerNews a funeral now?

Or are you suggesting that this thread is that hapless teenager's virtual burial place?
Well, it isn't, but it is rather distasteful.
That figure is meaningless, it is amortizing the total operational cost of GM over each vehicle sale, when the total operational cost of GM is not directly proportional to number of cars sold- not by a long shot. The article is falsely portraying that as the average sale price per unit minus marginal cost per car, which it is not.
Seymour Papert -- inventor of Logo, pioneer in AI -- and his brain injury
I think its more than a symbol. They would probably still get a lot money, but at least it would be mainly based on stock price/performance.
He's so prolific that for a while I wondered if _why wasn't really a collection of people. But, he's just so consistently odd and unique (in a good way) that it's hard to imagine that there could be more than one _why.

(Although, I wonder how hard it would be to use markov chains to generate _why-like rambling rants)
This would be fantastic if they are able to get the deals.
On my small webapp chrome has already overtaken safari and opera - perhaps in part to the chrome "one tab doesn't crash the rest" system which is pretty handy for webapps.
Which begs the question of justin.tv's whole raison d'etre:

How the f--- does facilitating self-perpetuated voyeurism (to this particular degree) add value to society?
I love the difference between Canada and US television. If that had happened here, he would have been referred to as an "astronomical expert", but instead there in Canada he's just a "space educator".
Is this how were going to sneak useless articles onto the front page now?

Take completely-unrelated-to-Hacking topic X and apply secondary "Engineering/Hacker opinion" Y to it?

"Well, condition Y now makes this Hacker-related, let's submit it!"
Love this. Determining how these "hidden metric spaces" arise in neural networks during the course of evolution could have great impact on the understanding of the brain. Dan Dennett talks of consciousness as a "meme machine" made up of lots of little unconscious "robots" or neurons. Perhaps this is not the entire story though. Perhaps the neurons have evolved to maximize efficiency in communication by means of some hidden metric space. I wonder if associations of "synchronicity" could come into play here. Say neuron A wants to get a signal to Location L following some Input I. Neuron A doesn't know Location L but knows that Neuron B always fires when something happens in L. So it sends the signal over to Neuron B, which, sure enough, passes it along to L, therefore, Neuron A is able to get the signal following a certain input over to L without knowing exactly the topological connections to L. Of course words like "know" and "want" are used metaphorically, obviously this arises dynamically via blind trial and error. So Dennett's robots take on a new layer of interest: perhaps by being able to form associations between temporally or spatially related events, they can construct signal patterns via a "hidden metric space" for better efficiency. Figuring out how this additional efficiency comes about by figuring out how these hidden connections evolve could make artificial neural nets more efficient. Right now, I think neural nets are largely "brute force" - add more neurons for better results. But perhaps hidden metric spaces could help us get better results from the same neuron number. Anyway. Way cool.
No. But in the US you can be held civilly liable for all sorts of things, crime or not.

I think that's what justin.tv is more concerned with.
While in all likelihood, this was done for cost-cutting purposes (as the article states), I actually like the idea.

I'm a college student myself, and while I have an email address with the school, I just have all my mail forwarded from that account (which uses the awful Outlook Web interface and doesn't offer PHP3 or IMAP) to my GMail account. It's considerably more convenient.

Some people will probably disagree with me, but even if more colleges just offered the option to make your account either a full account or simply a forwarding address (as opposed to just forwarding mail from the mailbox, as my account does), it would be worthwhile.
Google: Algorithms Aren’t the Only Answer
LBS: A Dream Continually Deferred
I'm suggesting that joking about a person's death needs to be considered against the nature of that death and the current environment.

It's very likely that the family of that kid will happen upon this forum and that post in the next little while, and I think as a community it would be nice if they weren't met with the same idiotic comments that they'll find on the bodybuilding site.

It's the same thing as making jokes about 9/11 victims on 9/12, but there's no hard and fast rule. Such is the case with pretty much every social nicety.
It's not a coincidence, indeed, it is a logical inevitability: it is far easier to treat your employees well if your company is successful.
To paraphrase Goodie Mob: Rubyists don't dance no mo'.
Amazon Beats Out Google as Best Cloud Provider
Why choose? You can pick up enough PHP or Python to be proficient in a day, each. Just learn enough to be able to read code in both and figure out which one you want to be writing for the majority of the day.

In the end, what's important is how comfortable you are writing code in that language. Large systems and sites have been created using both.

Personally, I like Python more for both web and general programming, having used both.
Ask HN: New site to help with "where to go for dinner?"
Cooked up Eatbite (http://www.eatbite.com) to help me decide on "where to go for dinner / what to order." Taking a slightly different approach than Yelp, Zagats, etc in focusing only on pictures of food. NYC-only for now, but I'd be interested to hear any suggestions and ideas! Obviously an early prototype...
Watching someone dying and not doing anything about it is different than telling someone to kill himself on a forum. Also, read my comment again. I never said I hoped they get charged with something, I said it would be interesting to see if they do. There will be a public outcry and no doubt some prosecutor is going to try to pin some charges against them.
Oh, don't worry, we're just as bad as you guys with our "experts". The guy probably heads up the school visit department at the local planetarium.
Have you read it?

It is more about the connection of database engineering and "the real world" than about gay marriage.
With and without it, trying to compile this:

long a = 10;
int b = 20;
printf("min is %ld\n", min(a, b));

With, it generates a warning:

davidw@fortrock:/tmp$ gcc -o min min.c
min.c: In function ‘main’:
min.c:13: warning: comparison of distinct pointer types lacks a cast

Without, there is no warning.
Google is trying hard to keep love in the romance; the love story should continue.
If only this had happened before Ron Paul lost the nomination, imagine what Google search would look like.
well this is better than what most schools do now a days, give you an account for the 4 years, then you lose it when you graduate...along with all the contacts who have that email address. No forwarding or anything like that either
Thanks for the feedback, I have made those changes, and I think you're right, it looks better:

http://www.babynameclusters.com/d/hn-feedback

and

http://www.babynameclusters.com/map/Male
Then you can call me out for being a noob, if you wish. :)