skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing you didn't really address is what the benefits of open-sourcing your product would be. Unless I missed something, the discussion so far has only been about the (real or imagined) downside.
Ask HN: Is 400Mhz makes a huge difference in MacBook?
Hi, i'm looking forward to buy the new MacBook 13". Primarily use it for web development (Rails or PHP) and general tasks (email, music, surfing etc). What I want to ask is, from your experience, is it worth to spend about AUD$450 more for 400 Mhz difference (2.0Ghz compare to 2.4Ghz)?
Thanks! :D
You can search for discount codes too.
Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?
"This messages are because of vulnerability in Heysan.com.
Once you click on any of this messages your buddy list will also start receiving the similar messages."

http://virgintech.blogspot.com/2008/11/ignore-chat-messages-...

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Talk/thread?tid=31569b...

"This is a virus link. Your Gmail account has been infected. You need to clean out your computer with antivirus and antispyware scanners." "Yeah, it sure is a virus and is spreading quite alarmingly. Be cautious where you enter your passwords."

Certainly seems to be going viral :/
Laid-Off Worker Kills CEO and Two Others at Santa Clara Semiconductor Startup
The existing IM networks have been bad/lazy about monetization. What meebo etc are doing is pretty cool. They have the audience, and now just have to turn the screws to extract money from them.

Not everyone is after an acquisition, and as far as I remember Meebo has enough money to go a few years while they figure out how best to monetize their massive audience.
i don't see how distributing the code of your engine could aid your game be more successful.
Webcams Gone Wild Modeling Opportunities
Webcams Gone Wild is currently accepting applications from qualified models for one of the highest paying, highest quality webcam sites online today. We do not employ thousands of models from all walks of life, but rather employ 1-200 quality females interested in committing themselves to an extremely lucrative career in the cam industry. Our models work anywhere from 10-60 hours a week, with typical income ranging from $300-$2500 weekly.
hmm... this sounds familiar...
Golden Rule for Startups
I don't see how you can say that the Greeks were more devout than people are today.
Well, I was hoping for more details than a brief answer to a FAQ.

See this earlier post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=356461

His baseball projections are based on a proprietary algorithm (PECOTA).

From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PECOTA :

detailed formulas are proprietary and have not been shared with the baseball research community.
Well, he lists all the variables in the regression he uses, tells you where he gets the polls, how he weights them, how he adjusts for timing, how he incorporates the regression results, etc. The FAQ is anything but brief -- there are LOTS of little links where he specifies all the details.

I agree it's not super well-documented where you can just plug-in numbers and go, but it seems like he provides the details that someone else would need to do something similar.

It depends on your goal. If you want to exactly replicate his work, you'd need access to the exact same data, and maybe he hasn't specified exactly what he uses to train the regression model. But if you just want to do something similar, the ingredients are all right there.

Also, re: the "proprietary" formula, it means that you don't know the specific parameters his model uses. But if you just want to learn how to do something similar (which is what it seems like is your goal), the information is all there. The methods aren't proprietary at all.
JQuery Solar System
Chandrayaan...dates & milestones of the mission
Can you really compile Clojure into .class files? I was wondering that the other day, and the conclusion that I reached was that it doesn't work that way.
Laid-Off Tech Worker Kills 3 in Silicon Valley
Its not complicated at all, an there are a host of reasons to use it. How about your read the site and watch the videos before making a statement like that.
I would be very surprised if a CTO position to Obama would be any more than an adviser with a different focus than the current raft of other advisory positions.

Most start-ups have a hard time defining the CTO role. I doubt a new white house position could be so easily defined.
Django 1.0.1 released
I made the same mistake of trying to give unsolicited advice after I made my way through Y Combinator. You soon realize, though, that the people that want it will ask for it, and the people that need it, if they need it enough, will discover that they need it and seek it. Even then, your advice, and its delivery thereof, might not actually be wanted.

This blog post seems more appropriate as a private email, where Peldi can extrapolate what he pleases instead of feeling pressured to render some kind of opinion on the issue. Instead he now must make some kind of humble and gracious show of his acceptance, whether or not he really wanted or appreciated the advice.
Looks like Mozilla has blocked the heysan gtalk log in page as a web forgery.

http://i36.tinypic.com/2iuccgg.png

http://m.heysan.com/gtalk
Easy Multi-Database Support for Django
I think it would still be hard to catch cheaters who pushed the limit in ways that are difficult to measure, for example, 'map-hacks', or 'aim-bots'. How can you tell if someone is cheating or is merely so good that they have a preternatural sense of the game? And if people know what the statistical checks are, by virtue of them being open source, why can't they push the limits while still staying well away from what's detectable as 'bootable cheating?'
The only reason I didn't switch to mod_passenger is that I still have nightmares from apache configuration and like the nginx config files....
Add URL links - A big list of link directories for SEO
Yay for Kansas!
I recommended http://www.uvnc.com/pchelpware/index.html
You can customize it with your company needs and it's really fast.
Aaah we all love a good soap opera :-) But seriously, apart from that Zed/DHH warfare, I do wonder what Zed's experience means for the open source business model. To be honest, I don't believe that Zed is the asshole his tone sometimes suggests and that makes me wonder why he didn't get good jobs as the creator of Mongrel. That's much more interesting than DHH's silly lie.

And Zed is by no means alone. I seem to remember that Guido Van Rossum wasn't paid for his work on Python for many many years, until 2005 actually when he was hired by google. (Of course I don't know whether he actually tried to get paid for python work) During all those years, python was one of the most popular programming languages.

In the commercial space, someone who makes something as popular as Mongrel, let alone Python, does get paid more than enough for one person. Something's very wrong with this business model.
Congratulations!! Good luck and keep post on HN on how it goes!
As often as I can.
They could. And cheaters using "sensor hacks" or "map hacks" can't be detected server-side because those hacks just provide information to the cheater client-side, without actually affecting gameplay directly (they don't alter the cheater's speed, aim, etc). But the way to beat those type of hacks is to minimize the amount of information the server sends to the client. If an opponent is just around the corner, then that fact shouldn't be transmitted to the client until the client is just about to turn that corner. So the client-side "sensor hacks" aren't very useful in that regard because the cheater isn't actually receiving extra information until it's basically too late to act on it.

But here's the thing. The goal is not to detect all cheaters. That's not really possible. The goal is to eliminate all seriously disruptive cheaters. For example, the guys who run around with a speedhack plus an aimbot and annihilate every opponent in just a few seconds. That would quickly ruin the game, so those are the most important type of hacks to prevent. And I could just let the community report each offense then ban the cheater afterward, but that doesn't really scale, and at that point the cheater might have already ruined the game for a lot of people. So it would be advantageous to implement a way to detect cheaters realtime.

The server-side anti-cheat code would remain closed-source, so it wouldn't be known which probabilities were being monitored. Other parts of the server code also have to remain closed-source, actually, because otherwise people would be able to examine the game's rules to gain tactical knowledge. (i.e. a player could read the game rules source code to learn where and when creatures will spawn, then that player would go around and camp all the right spots to gain maximum benefit.) However, that's a fundamentally different motivation for keeping the source code closed. At that point, it's not closed because we're worried about the competition; it's closed to ensure that the game will stay enjoyable. So that type of thing doesn't seem like it would go against the spirit of open-source.

Consider this -- if people are cheating by pushing their statistics to the point just before they would get banned, then those cheats don't actually impact other players very much, because the cheater's statistics are still within acceptable ranges. At that point, the cheaters are using the cheats so infrequently that they don't statistically affect gameplay. So in that regard, it isn't necessarily worth the extra effort to stop them, because the goal of enforcing reasonable gameplay statistics has been achieved, so the overall game experience is mostly fine from other players' point of view.

Also, your blog posts are great. Please keep on writing them. One specific part of your writing I'm interested in is this:

"Increasing my effective working memory has an impressively super-linear effect on my problem solving ability, how fast I can learn things, and also how much fun I’m having."

I have working memory problems, so it would be really fantastic to learn how you improved yours. I didn't know it was even possible to do that.
Hà Nội đang triển khai 8 dự án du lịch sinh thái lớn
To be slightly unfair, your strength of character is defined not by your behaviour to those who can defend themselves, but to those who look like they deserve to be put down...

I'm not attacking you, mind you, just pointing out that it's a better general principle to treat others based on what you believe is civil and acceptable rather than based on whether other people think this particular person deserves it.
Fuck, I can do pretty well with a Sparcstation 5! Especially running Linux 2.6 + X.org.

dillo would probably still be pretty snappy even on a 12mhz 386
Ask HN: How do you write a book?
What is the best way to organize a complex or chaotic topic into an organized whole? I'd be grateful for practical solutions people actually used to complete a book. Thanks.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364703
This is the 2nd edition: there's a new edition out now.
http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Danie...

I have no idea what's changed.
Oblong's g-speak: 'Minority Report' UI brought to life
I don't hate him, in fact I found many of his articles spot-on. But this thing is either a joke, or...
Tracking down a likely study is fairly trivial.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120119761/abstrac...

Unfortunately it's behind a paywall.

This is somewhat outside my field but I do have institutional access.

Based on my limited understanding of the area I would take issue with the quote. Although the data supports the statement that few people with the bad version lived beyond 85 (survival function was 0.1 at 75 and dropped to zero at about 87) it doesn't support the statement that people with the good version are likely to live to 100 (survival function was 0.75 at 75, 0.35 at 87 but still drops to zero at 102
What exactly is meant by incurred technical debt? How do you have "margin calls" on technical debt? Totally confused.
No, only the first is valid. :)
Some people _believe_ it's #2 but it isn't, sorry. :D
"performance of the system under load" is just that, performance.

See the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability
Perhaps this is what you're looking for?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362657
I quit my job last year December, and coded for 4 months straight before I took another job.

I'm very near to closing a deal with the web application that I started in January. Next year April I plan to resign again, and start another new venture. This time with a bit more of my own seed money.
I just watched it in full screen mode. The resolution is quite high, and it was easy to see everything.
Even Livingston made fun of us. That's how you know it's bad.

Usually she hugs you while you're down.
Yeah if you're not getting at least $200-400 off the list price with a coupon you're getting screwed. Even big box stores can undercut Dell prices w/coupons. I used to think Dell would always have the lowest price until I found that stores like Best Buy can undercut even direct sales from online.
Study Shows How We Evolved Different Personalities
I was talking to my wife this morning about this discussion, and the notion that having one of each sex as parents being important. She's got (among other degrees and years of relevant experience) a Masters in this from Harvard.

It turns out that the literature about child development finds that much more important than "one of each" parent is having multiple available adult figures around that a kid feels comfortable talking to.

This is for at least three reasons:

1. The kid can get multiple viewpoints.

2. The kid, during adolescence goes through the process of distancing themselves from their parents and during that time needs other sources of adult guidance.

3. The kid can compartmentalize what they talk to different adults about (one about sex, one about drugs, hopefully me about rock and roll.)

Lacking that, a kid will get information from other kids. That's a dangerous road.
I'm going through this right now for nanowrimo. ;)

At first I used word (very lame, I know), but a friend recommended Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html) to me a while ago, and I've been using that instead, but it's an OS X only tool. I love it. I'm not a writer, but I really needed some tools to help me finish nanowrimo, and scrivener is it.

I've occasionally used mindmapping tools for occasional papers I've written, if it's extremely chaotic you may want to look into that, although I don't know how much help it might be.
Tick Tock - An Air Powered Scooter
WebEx is the dinosaur, but I like TeamViewer http://www.teamviewer.com/ - it is inexpensive and works _very_ well.
Wikimapia - Let's describe the whole world
Tech Industry Feels a Slump
YouTube Geo Search + Gears Geolocation = Find Flix Near You
Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer
My head hurts from laughing so much...
nooot.
Just start writing, using whatever works best for you. I've been using TextEdit on the mac a lot lately for my writing, but anything's good.

If you're writing for a publisher, then they're going to give you a template that's probably for Word, and you don't have to worry about complicated document struturing stuff -- they'll help with the referencing, etc.

If you're doing it all yourself, then a document description system such as LaTeX might be the way to go. If I was writing a technical book that i knew had little chance of being published, I'd probably use that.
You play a $40 lottery @ TopCoder... to reduce your chances of winning
http://www.topcoder.com/html/cockpit/landing_page/contest_pricing.html

To win a minimum of $200, you pay $40 to participate. And then, there are only 1-3 winners at any contest. For every person that adds to the competition, his/her probability of winning reduces the moment they pay $40... will this encourage people to participate in any manner?
I always like to start with a mindmap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map) of the key points. Once I have those, I flesh out the individual nodes underneath. I then organize into Chapters/sections and start writing.

I've read where some people create a PowerPoint presentation and work backwards from that as well. The key thing for me is that I don't want to get tied down to Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc too early - I want the flexibility to move things around without hindering my thinking process. That's the sort of thing that is perfect for mind mapping tools like FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page).
I'd venture that it refers to bad decisions that lead to low quality of code, the problems of which are inherited by all code built on it. And so on. With every layer you pay for your past mistakes, and you quickly spend more time working around the problems than you would have spent fixing them in the first place. (or fixing the stuff below before layering even more code on)

For example, the amount of hoops I had to jump through to be allowed to fix some old code at my last job was astounding, even though the bugs had literally caused man-years of lost work, and eventually took me about 2 weeks to sort out.
From Vim to Emacs - part 2
The advice I've gotten: Write a book proposal. In it, lay out chapters with one or two paragraph summaries. The process forces you to think a lot about organization. It also provides a blueprint/outline for you going forward. You'll see how the ideas fit together to recognize missing gaps in your thesis. Keep in mind that it's an evolving document and as you write more you'll be better able to incorporate new material and scrap old forks. Starting with the summary provides clear signposts along the way.

Good luck!

Edit: Of course, I forgot the reason why many folks also write a proposal: To shop it around, get an agent, and an advance. Problem is, that usually requires some connections in the industry, special expertise, compelling story, and/or all of the above. You don't need to shop it around to get the benefits, though it's nice to have if you happen to run into someone who could help.
Why thinking in the shower may be an ideal model for "creative pause"
Solo Science: Tinkering outside the tower
An ever-compiling quine in Scheme
The Fast, Good and Cheap Pricing Method
Speeding Up Rails Development
Classic Graphic Novel, The Watchmen, trailer
Salary history: Just say no
Top Ten Software Engineering Concepts
The A-B-C's of Mass Customization: 26 companies/people changing manufacturing
A sad day in Silicon Valley. Startup employee gets fired, kills 3 people.
Grand Theft Auto meets WOW: More subscription based games coming soon
I find thinking on the bus works best for me. I now actively don't carry any books with me there. The combination of listening to some music I like and retreating into my own mental bubble brings up all sorts of interesting ideas. Instead of books, I now carry a notepad.
"Just start writing" is pretty terrible advice for writing a non-fiction book. The greatest value of such a book is in the synthesis of the subject at hand... without high level organisation, that synthesis simply won't be. Chaotic, messy non-fiction is terrible.

Fiction writing, on the other hand, can go totally chaotic... but I imagine the OP is talking about non-fiction.
Apple’s enterprise strategy the same as it ever was
via John Gruber. The insightful quote:

To be an enterprise company is, in a very real way, to cede a great deal of control over your product line to your customers... Here’s the simple truth: Enterprise hates surprises. It’s not what they want. Enterprise wants predictability. They want to know when, what, how much, and that it will be all new and cool, yet change nothing... And they want to know everything in detail a year ahead of time.
via John Gruber. The insightful quote:

To be an enterprise company is, in a very real way, to cede a great deal of control over your product line to your customers... Here’s the simple truth: Enterprise hates surprises. It’s not what they want. Enterprise wants predictability. They want to know when, what, how much, and that it will be all new and cool, yet change nothing... And they want to know everything in detail a year ahead of time.

I have found this to be very true. To sell to "Enterprise" is to put your customers in control of your product in almost every way. They dictate your schedule, your features, your pricing, everything. And they don't have your success or competitive advantage foremost in their mind. Nor, unfortunately, do they have their success or competitive advantage foremost in their mind.

Take the predictability thing. Is that to their advantage? Seemingly, but given the choice between having vendors that surprise me with revolutionary things that change my business for the better or vendors that make the same old things in a predictable way, I would prefer a surprise.

But I'm thinking like an owner. The people who buy enterprise software are managers, and their personal success is driven by showing that they can manage, which is measured by predictability. That's the very definition of management in an enterprise: hitting your numbers consistently is worth more than being all over the map but having better numbers than the next guy.
When I said 'worthless competition' I surely was thinking about General Motors and its total lack of innovation, compared with korean and japanese car companies.
Ask HN: where do you post job ads?
Where do you post the job ads for non-IT workers like office-manager, accountant etc, but closely related to the IT specifics? Also, where to post for the network administrators?

I'd favor the websites requiring a reasonable fee, as these tend to provide better response.

This is for the research I'm currently doing as part of my duties. Thank you!
Great, another geeky blog rant offering no substantiation or content to speak of. As a mac user, I have to agree with his premise, though. It might be a different story for Windows users.
What a bizarre concept. Both HR and the applicant should have done market research and come to similar conclusions about the appropriate salary range. If the applicant is qualified, what on earth does it matter if he was lowballed by his previous employer? Similarly, if the applicant did his research properly and is still applying for the job, clearly he is indicating that he is prepared to take a pay cut.

Also, the self-righteousness of claiming "privileged information" is patently absurd. I'll tell anyone who asks what I make. More transparency gives power to employees. Companies want you to keep your salary a secret for their own reasons.
I have a bath every day about 2pm for this very purpose :/ As strange as that sounds.
Actually it is ok advice taken as the first step. Write to see what you think. Then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
could the author have used bold any more?
Nothing like trying to read an article on mySQL optimization and I get "Error establishing database connection" .. :(
Ask HN: Are XFN links and FOAF popular enough to base a startup idea on them?
Just a few hours ago I read http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html

The phrase "idea from a shower" caught my eye and in very little time I could see myself brain-storming ideas on paper. I like one idea which uses XFN links and FOAF. But are they popular enough to base an idea on them? Is is possible to urge people to describe their relations with XFN and FOAF by adding it in the plugin that I develop?

To be precise, my idea isn't new. It's just what other few startups are doing. But in a different way: by utilizing these XFN and FOAF data.
For Sale: Clean, Lightly Used IP Address?
Ask YC: What digital download solution are you using?
Debating whether to go with hosted solution vs turnkey scripts.
Yes, in a sense. We just couldn't deal with as many startups if we had rolling admissions. So that would mean funding fewer, which would let us take longer deciding.