skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll just refer to my previous comment about twitter.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378541

Outside hacker news and "Valley-oriented" news-sites I've hardly heard it mentioned.

Twitter may have potential, but it still has massive usability problems, and at large is one of the few services I've signed up for which has offered me absolutely nothing of value and no way to improve on that.

Saying twitter, a bandwidth hole with no actual plan to monetize on its service, is worth millions is clearly overstating its value, even with its current user-base.
David Lightman. He was smart, nerdy, witty and got the girl.
NILFS is a log-structured file system supporting versioning of the entire file system
Being productive means getting things done, regardless of your definition.
The Catholic Church is not collapsing. It is growing, albeit by expanding vigorously outside the West.
Yes, but Facebook could replicate it by putting a link on Facebook to Facetwitter and then hiring both Twitter users who do not have Facebook accounts.
"Have faith, Loopt, if your idea goes big somebody else will be around to capitalize on it!" does not strike me as something which would warm the heart of an investor.
I'm not claiming this is the case, but would someone who has followed the Python development care to enlighten the rest of the world about this?

With the statement that Python 3 "will break compatibility" and nobody objecting is Python slowly turning PHPesque?
Maybe if you go in sheer user numbers, but it really isn't releveant to me. I will never ever consider to write a web application in Delphi or VB.

Maybe by numbers horses and mules are still the most important means of transport in the world. Doesn't mean that I should worry about buying a horse now.
No, I am just saying that this data lumps totally unrelated fields together.

I would guess that VB is maybe used by Excel users who write little scriplets for their Excel sheets, but rarely by programmers.

It is like saying "PCs and cars are the most popular products in the world", since I am not interested in cars, I simply don't care. I only care about the popularity of PCs. The data is correct, but it is irrelevant to me.
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
I think that is just patronizing. Thank you, I can decide for myself whether I want to use credit cards or not.
NOOOOOOOOOO
finally something usefull ..
if i see an embedded youtube video and i want to view something else now i can ^^
I'm confused. I thought monopolies in the US are legal. I thought that abusing the power of a monopoly was the illegal part. Were they going to charge them as being a monopoly? Or charge them with illegal monopolistic practices?

Is there a lawyer in the house?
ahh, we don't get housing either. so you may come out ahead after all
How about making the search more user friendly by offering a simpler search option in addition to the regexp search?

Many potential users may struggle to figure out regexps.
I loved it, but I still want better threading and multi-core support in CPython... Most desktops now have two cores and it doesn't seem likely that number will fall anytime soon...
The Problem With Logging
First superconducting transistor promises PC revolution
I've really got to learn to stop posting anything to HackerNews that in any way can be construed as an admission of weakness or vulnerability. I sensed that was the case here when I was writing, but didn't think it was necessary to hide it. I will be more careful in future to not reveal more than is absolutely necessary, and so avoid this typical, casually condescending reply. It's annoying because it's the "mistake" that gets seized on, instead of what I'm saying... as if there's more interest in correction than communication.

Maybe I am alone here in disliking unsolicited advice, but ironically, when I ask a question here, I usually don't get any help...

...so perhaps the secret is not to ask, but state something that incidentally reveals the lack of knowledge, so the scent of inexcusable ignorance rouses the instinctive hacker display of superior knowledge. I will try this.

Or maybe, I am just not a hacker. Although I love coding (especially to help other people) and I'm not a corporate type, I am coming to think this more and more; because behaviour like giving unsolicited advice seems to be totally acceptable and approved of on sites like this, but by my values is a form of trolling, and has never sat well with me.

EDIT I just checked the site mqt lists in his profile (http://mark.nirv.net/), and judging by his May 26, 2007 entries, he does troll at times ("What a f______ p___"; "Use a spell checker next time, a______." - to me, that's really abusive). Trolls have sometimes gotten under my radar by combining genuine knowledge and apparent helpfulness with their trolling. Oh well, you live and you learn; without risking mistakes and uncongeniality, one cannot learn.
I don't know Dave Ramsey, but he apparently puts his money where his mouth is. And this should be honored.

Whether you agree with his opinion on credit cards is another story.
Project Deploy: Customize project directory
Dude chillout I wasn't exactly serious. But I do think that Python deserves the spot as the nr 1 scripting language.

And of course competition is good.

And I don't think the community alienates new users, on the contrary I find it very helpful.
I find your essay a bit confusing because you never define what "success" or "better" means. There are many different ways of measuring organizational success.

When you say that traditionally, bigger organizations were better, do you mean they were better:

a) militarily
b) in developing new technologies that make lives better
c) in producing goods like trains and cars
d) better at generating revenues/profits
e) better at attracting the best and the brightest
f) producing achievements that are remembered by historians
g) all of the above

It is important to clarify this, because some of these measures of success oppose each other. For instance, the Egyptian governments were great at f) but at the expense of b).

I at first took your essay to define success as b) improving technology. But if so, the thesis is obviously wrong. Most of the great inventions of the industrial revolution were created by tinkerers and small enterprises, not large organizations. Just look at the development of the textile technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_clothing_and_textil... . Almost every single invention from 1600 to 1900 was developed by a startup (and many of these startups were funded by outside investors, Kleiners Perkins has nothing on the Boston Associates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boston_Associates ).
How in.iFund can outperform iFund
Actually, he's asking you to put your money where his mouth is - and without any credit card protection.

A cynic would also point out that that by not accepting credit cards he also avoids losing the cutr of the transaction that they charge and so makes more money.

I'm not a cynic of course. Personally, my credit card is paid of automatically each month in full.
Okay, I understand your objection, and I think we're going to just have to disagree on that one.

I'm actually curious about that psmtp.com thing, I remember setting my mx records to point to something that shouted "yes, I use Google", maybe they have some separate arrangement? (I dug a bit, and my MX is: ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM)
Does anyone know what he meant by "55 domains to 'surround' truemors.com" ?
If we're not strictly speaking about stable, widely available versions, how about we talk about how awesome Perl 6 is? Because it really is astonishingly, mind-bendingly awesome.

Granted, the leading Perl 6 implementation is still a little over a year away (though Parrot hits 1.0 in March, which is a pretty cool milestone in and of itself), and I imagine Ruby 1.9 will be widely available long before then.
If you like abbrev, try out pabbrev, its even more awesome. (Theres also another predictive abbrevation mode that seems to have better UI, but I had difficulty getting it working in my "I will spend 30 minutes mucking with my .emacs" moment)
The biggest challenge we face in the near future is vast: it's the energy crisis.

The economic downturn is doing us, if anything, a favour: it means we use less energy, and are slowly prepared for the realisation we're going to have to work incredibly hard to dig ourselves out of the fossil fuel hole.
If it was only that.

How about "Unicode, only Unicode, nothing but Unicode"? Doesn't it smell Microsoftish/Sunish? 16-bit data is a pain in the arse, and as long as communication hardware is essentially 8-bit, Unicode will never replace old good 8-bit and UTF. It will only make your I/O programming harder and the programs themselves slower, with no real benefit. UTF-8 gives you a perfect solution for all your localization needs without any special support on the compiler side.

I have mixed feelings about Python "3000". Many changes are meant to bring more consistency (if saying you shouldn't do this because it's bad is called "consistency"), however, as a result Python 3 will successfully make it into the corporate environments, but will never be truly popular among geeks. Stick with 2.6, it's nice.
You mean "the end of thinking out loud?"
Actually, most of the complaints I've seen about the Touch and the iPhone seem to be about the lack of storage. I have a 16Gig Touch and it is crammed.

Let's see...

8Gigs of audio (including a lot of BBC podcasts)
4 Gigs of video
2 Gigs of photos
200Mb apps
200 megs app data.

I've never bought video through iTunes, but video is extremely useful. When we go away on holiday, I always encode a couple of children's series on to it which comes in very handy as an occassional treat for the two girls when its getting late and we are setting up a tent, or we have a boring hour or two in a aiport terminal or on a very long flight (We're in the UK, my wife's family in Australia). Video also gets used to transport home movies to my parents' house for viewing through the TV.

Is video a 'killer app'? No, but it was definitely a nice-to-have factor in the purchasing decision, as was the excellent Web browsing and e-mail client.
people will look back on Windows for the novel features that it has and wonder why nobody brings them back.

I don't know what bizarro future you envision, but I hope quantum states dictate I don't end up in that parallel existence..!
Converting video for the iPod is really rather simple:

http://handbrake.fr/

... not just for DVDs anymore.
all true!
I didn't think mqt's response was remotely condescending, and I'm the queen of "I'm just trying to help" bitchiness.

I think you need to be aware that not everyone who disagrees with you or fails to kiss your ass is trolling.

Or, in true trolling style: stop whining.
As a debit card is just as easy to use as a credit card, the argument that I'm likely to spend more with a credit card is bogus as well.

Except for the credit card continuing to work even if you don't have the funds right now?
Well, the course notes should be rewritten to say:

print('Hello World')

Then it'll work in both Python 2 and 3.
Why? He increased noise.

Another meritless product wrapped in buzzwords competing for attention in the space that others have created.

He has acted as an entrepreneurial spammer.
Ask HN: Anecdotes about the current job market
Some of the discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385368 got me curious about the current job market (either in the US or abroad). I was just wondering what sort of hiring practices/offers people are seeing?

Personally, I've found a lot of the big companies that I would have liked to work for (Cisco, Sun, etc) have hiring freezes or have drastically cut new hires. Oddly, the hedge funds were still hiring, with very good pay. A lot of smaller niche companies (healthcare, defense, manufacturing, etc) were hiring, but I got the feeling that competition was a bit more fierce than usual.

Just curious about how others found the market now.
Well, processing fees are there for both - I'm not sure he's making a big win there.

But chargebacks are very common in online retailing. I don't think you can chargeback a debit transaction, can you?

Also, if his business is dealing with people who are at the end of their rope, defaults and chargebacks may be more common.
It's not like anybody is forced to buy anything from him. You are free to look (and pay) for advice somewhere else.

Without any statistics to prove it, I would reckon that Ramsey looses more money buy alienating potential customers than he saves on transaction fees.

I also think that CCs have their benefits, if used in a responsible way. But if Ramsey is strictly against CCs, not accepting them shows integrity.

At least, it creates massive buzz if the tubes pick up the story ;)
Skype uses Delphi?
mqt didn't disagree with me, and I didn't say that he did.

Those are your thoughts.
And fashion, lets not forget the fashion. What's this seasons colour?
Ask YC: Bug Tracking
I am looking for a bug tracking tool for our small software development startup. Open-source is preferred. Less importantly - if its written in Python/Java it would be preferable.
Any suggestions?
You think that the point of that offer is to make YOU money? No, it's to make the bank money by convincing enough people to use credit cards. If everyone would follow your system, that offer would not exist.

So these 'benefits' you tout are just marketing.
Silly question, but the commentary on whether you should run down the battery now and then is interesting. What's the opinion here?
Trac and redmine seem nice. Trac is in Python.
Samsung C260 Please Wait Hang Restart
c260, c260 hang problem, c260 hangs up, c260 jam, c260 please wait, c260 restart, hang, please, problem, samsung, samsung c260
I bailed on this after I realized the entire article was along the lines of "The economy is bad. Really, really bad. It's so bad that I am now going to compare it to a salad fork for the next 26 paragraphs."
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I think you'll see less embedding going on if this isn't turn off-able in some way. It not only takes up quite a bit of space - it steals your visitors' attentions, too.

Instead of letting people easily watch videos embedded in your site, you're now giving them the option to get distracted by searching around for something else.

This is a good move for YouTube though - more videos watched and more exposure.
Under "Performance" at http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html :

The net result of the 3.0 generalizations is that Python 3.0 runs the pystone benchmark around 10% slower than Python 2.5. Most likely the biggest cause is the removal of special-casing for small integers. There’s room for improvement, but it will happen after 3.0 is released!
I expect it's just a case of removing optimizations in order to get everything stable, then they can start work on new optimizations. I'm not a Python dev though, so elaboration would be cool ;-)
CRM     
Sage Business Solutions provides end-to-end financial accounting, Enterprise Resource Planning [ERP], Customer Relationship Management [CRM] and Business Intelligence software solutions to large, mid-size and small business in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands for the life of your business.
I am not much familiar with anti trust laws. Can a foreign firm make this deal with Yahoo ? If yes then Google can create a proxy firm to make the deal, will it still be considered monopoly ?
Top 20 Young Internet Entrepreneurs Under 21
The Ultimate Guide for the New Entrepreneur in Seattle
Large organisations are modelled on the military. So were schools. And many more countries had compulsory national service. Now schools are evolving and university with all its freedoms is more likely experience than military service for most new entrants to the workforce, it's not surprising that a huge, rigid, hierarchical structure is no longer relevant or even tolerable to many people.

Another point to bear in mind: more small companies means more outsourcing, particularly for legal, HR, IT support, and so on. We should also see masses more companies using shared business premises, with shared receptions and so on.

Small companies should also mean more teleworking, since (1) people in small companies are generally more open to the idea of it, and (2) it's easier to keep track of what everyone in a smaller company is doing, even if they are working remotely, and (3) it means small companies can have international representation which may be one guy in a specific Asian country working from a bedroom-office.
> mqt didn't disagree with me, and I didn't say that he did.

Neither did I.
I'm a bit disappointed in all this "bah humbug, I can manage my credit cards" attitude.

That site is specifically for people who are struggling to manage their finances. I'm not really sold that their reasons for not accepting credit cards make sense (lack of fraud protection is the biggest problem). But it makes some psychological sense. You don't see a lot of AA meetings held in bars.

Also, complaining that the average yokel can't manage their credit is like complaining that users can't deal with a command-line interface. Sure the discipline to learn it would pay off, but most people aren't wired that way. Furthermore the credit system as we have it now is designed, by very talented professionals, to prey on common flaws in the human mammal's ability to assess risk and future obligation.

Everybody has something that they're irrational about. Don't make me ask you how much time you've spent on WoW this month.

Lastly, those of us on this board are probably lucky to have relatively high-paying jobs, even if we were less-than-perfect students or tried startup life for a while. The demand is just that great. But software is a huge anomaly in the North American economy. Wages for most people have been flat, relative to inflation, for decades. And furthermore, the risk of sudden and prolonged drops in income has been much higher since 1970 or so. For hackers that means okay, okay, I'll take the stupid J2EE job. For the average North American worker, it might mean accepting some stupid low wage service job.

Anyway, the point is, most families have been making up the difference with credit cards. They're not living extravagantly and still they're falling behind. See this lecture by Elizabeth Warren, "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class". (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A) that punctures some of the myths with hard stats.
Lamarck ideas are nearly always advanced as a form of genetics denialism. Lysenkoism being the prime example.

Also how would any research done now rehabilitate Lamarck? He had no evidence for his hypothesis and his theory was incredibly vague. It's as if he had suggested a hypothesis of a carriage without horses and you were now willing to credit him with the invention of the automobile.
The funny thing about the examples shown are that they look like generic representations of the people photographed rather than ultra precise renderings (you know, like how Star Trek figures only look casually like the actors).

You could probably have about 100 heads per gender with several hair colors and styles each and be able to pick one close enough to fool all but the pickiest of eyes.. and it'd probably be cheaper than customized fabrication too ;-)

Still, a cool idea, but I can't help but wonder if they're too accurate, you'd end up with an Uncanny Valley type effect.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley .. who wants to play with a figure that looks just like someone you know (or yourself)?
I think everyone who uses Python seriously understands that the 'break', while annoying, is necessary to create a better language.

No one really expects 2.6 to be abandoned any time soon (within the next 3 years or so) so there is plenty of time for projects you are dependant on to move over to 3.0.

I think the difference between PHP and Python is that the Python community is smaller and less antagonistic toward it's '(benevolent) dictator'.

I'm guessing a key difference is that most people (IMHO) that use python are programmers and understand that a little pain now is preferable to a dead language. A lot of PHP users aren't programmers. They are people who admin a PHPBB and for them it was just a huge PITA researching what worked and didn't between PHP4 and 5.

Of the 30 or so python packages that my work is dependant on none of them are moving to 3.0 solely and most of them haven't finished moving to 2.6 yet. They all support python 2.4+ I'm really not worried (I am aware that that statement could bite me in the arse within the next year :).
> I think you need to be aware that not everyone who disagrees with you or fails to kiss your ass is trolling.

?

EDIT I can't believe I've gotten drawn into this. Your use of loaded terms "bitchiness", "ass", "whining", giving your opinions as if they were truth, issuing commands, all in terms that didn't relate to the comment you were replying to, should have tipped me off. No more responses from me. Bye.
I don't know what you mean with PHP-esque really but I don't find it to make it messy, on the contrary the whole point seems to be to make Python more consistent and there are well-thought out plans for how to migrate code from one version to the other.
Yeah, that works, but oftentimes the protection isn't as good. For example, with many credit cards at this point you are liable for $0 worth of fraud, but with the debit as credit you are liable for the first $50.
Def a good idea to completely cycle your battery every now and then (i.e. use till your laptop totally runs out of juice and then totally charge again).

Battery chemistries have improved since the old NiCad days, but they will still exhibit some memory.

Also, batteries tend to have a lot of smarts in them nowadays - cycling the battery will let the electronics have a better idea of when the battery is actually full or empty. This will result in a better charge when you use the battery for real.

Afaik, that last point is why Apple recommend power cycling your battery every now and then.
Learning About the Open Stack for the Social Web at Digg (Friday December 19, 2008)
Don't pull numbers out of nowhere.

http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_compresu...

There's no way that an "average" starting salary is 70k. Salary.com is famously inflationary and they have the median at 54K--and that's not just fresh grads. My guess would be more like 40K, with huge variations depending on where you live and whether you went to a well-known school. But then, "average" people don't go to well-known schools for the most part.
When I read the sentence "An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn't want to work for a big company.", I stopped reading. Over-generalizations doesn't work.
The point of the offer is for the bank to signup new customers. I make money from cashback and save money on ATM fees. The bank won't make much if any money on me, but I'm not the average customer.

Many of the new customers will carry a balance, transfer a balance, and/or invest & trade with them. This makes the bank money. Now if everyone paid their balance in full, this offer wouldn't exist, but of course this doesn't happen.
Bots Get Smart
There's just no way I'm entering my debit card details online. If a crook gets a hold of those details somehow, they'll be spending directly from your bank account.
The download link for Python 3.0 is now featured prominently on the front page, above Python 2.6. I think this is a bad move, since many Python newbies will probably download Python 3.0 instead of 2.6, and then get frustrated when none of their 3rd-party packages work. python.org should keep Python 3.0 more hidden away for the time being to give time for the greater Python development community to migrate to 3.0.