skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If that held up in anything beyond the short term then Amazon would have killed their associates program years ago. The fact of the matter is that the associates program may cost them 5% of the sales but they believe it makes them significantly more profit than they would have without it. And, there is absolutely no doubt that Amazon has the stats to back up that belief.

I had the same thought as you, but it just doesn't hold up when you think about it from anything but a short-sighted perspective.

If I were amazon, and people were making apps as cool as Mazo to sell products for me I would set them loose on the world without hesitation. So what if they outshine the Amazon built app. Doing so would result in more enjoyment of a product that drives amazon sales, and provide an extremely cheap form of R&D for what features they should include in their own mobile app / site.
modu-whaaa? encapsu...lishion???? wow you must be one of them professor types!
ask anyone occupational therapist if the apple keyboard is recommended over, say, the kinesis advantage pro. if you aren't using a kinesis or one of its real competitors right now, you are not a "keyboard snob"

the apple keyboard:

- has no discernable key travel

- is not split and contoured

- is too small

its probably the biggest ergonomic nightmare out there. fortunately few people actually use them after buying the computer
Can you imagine asking for help from someone invited over for dinner who's occupation turned out to be plumbing?

"Oh, you're a plumber? Say, just the other day I dumped this leviathan that almost shattered my shitter, and clogged it good, too. Nobody's dared use it since. Would you mind grabbing that bull by the horns after dessert?"
My Mom's computer was acting up recently. She called me thinking I'd help her. I told her how rude it was to just call me up expecting instant support. Then I sent her my rate card, a simple NDA, and a standard short-term contract. Really man, I'm with you, some people have such nerve!
"Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)

This is a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GNU GPL. It is incompatible with version 2 of the GNU GPL because of the conditions in sections 3(B) and 3(C).

Please do not use this license for anything you write; there are already well-known free software licenses that serve the same purpose, such as the Apache License version 2.0, and we must all stand together to combat license proliferation. However, there is no reason to avoid using software released under this license.
"
source:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#SoftwareLice...
I think if you asked Einstein, he would probably have told you that he didn't really understand relativity.
Ooh, a greatest hits thread!

Best received: +53, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240170

I've got 8 posts (out of 1248) tied for worst, at zero. I ain't linking to 'em. They are neither a source of pride, nor offensive enough to be of that much interest. ;)
wouldn't call it fun.. more like aggravating.
Its sort of like playing horse with Michael Jordan. (My Dad has -- they happened to go to the same health club in Chicago. He tells the story much better.)

You may think you are playing horse. Michael Jordan is playing another game entirely. You probably don't understand the rules but don't worry, you're not winning in that one either.
I've submitted a few NYT stories - but they've all turned out to be submitted by someone else. All of them have been science stories that can't be found elsewhere. My reason for submitting them was, as PG said, they appealed to my hacker mind.
you can buy an i7-based desktop from dell for $1300, WITH A 24 INCH MONITOR. the i7 is at a minimum more than 200% faster than the mac pro's processors. don't believe me, read tomshardware or anandtech

for $2800 you can get one of the dell gaming i7 boxes that is tricked out far beyond anything apple offers hardware wise, once again, a minimum of 200% performance improvement

the mac math once again does not hold up. and where is their snob appeal? they don't even have an i7 box on the market
It's really difficult to tell in advance whether a Mac or Windows System will serve you better, though your list of software is a good start - no AutoCad, Visio, Outlook or other platforms lockins.

There are three software tools that have kept me chained to Windows XP:

o Visio (Yes, I know OmniGraffle, but it's a Visio world where I work. I have a reasonably recent MacBook Pro with Maxed out RAM - but it still is a little laggy - and the controls just don't work the way my finger memory expects them to on a Mac) - Which is pretty mandatory if you do a lot of network diagrams.

o Outlook Calendar - Entourage / booking resources - just didn't have it nailed last time I checked it out.

o Lookout - Spotlight/Mail search isn't horrible - but when I need to search for a keyword or two in 145,000 email and get an answer back in 1/10th of a second - Nothing beats Lookout. I use it 20 times a day. It truly is the google of mail searching (Ironically Google's Outlook index isn't that impressive)

With that said, I absolutely love the MacBookPro - best laptop I've ever owned. And, I spend my entire day in a terminal - and, you may mock me for saying this, but I personally have decided the cost of OS X and a good portion of the Macbook is justified by the terminal client alone. It puts Putty/SecureCRT to shame.

So - my solution has been to do both - I have the two keyboards (probably ergonomic nightmare) - one in front of the other, and do all my visio/lookout/outlook calendar on my five year old Precision 650 (Rock Solid workstation BTW), while Everything else is done on the MacBook Pro. Two monitors - a cheap 20" LCD for the Precision 650 and a 30" Dell for the MBPro.

I have zero issue switching back and forth - when I'm on the mac, Command-Space comes as natural to me as Ctrl-Escape does when I switch back to the windows system.
What game is he playing?

I've heard that, among elite Go players, it's most prestigious to beat an esteemed opponent by a small margin, such that a 1-point win is considered ideal.
I just go with "I work in software". Nobody really cares to ask more than that usually.
you can do it with off-the-shelf tools if your competitors decide to use really "hackerish" languages and tools and end up taking longer to produce the same or lesser product.
The kinds of social connections that result in F-500 CEOship are not acquired, but inherited or (in rare cases) purchased.
Scheme, Ruby and C mainly. Starting to explore Python and Objective C for various reasons. My comment wasn't intended to tout .NET as the best technology for every purpose as I realize the advantages of higher level languages for everyday development. He asked for a few advantages of .NET and I sincerely believe that with this new program, a lot of the barriers to using MSFT technologies have been removed. My current start up deals more with numerical problems that IMO are best tackled by C# and C++/CLI (or Python with C extensions). Similarly, if I was looking to write a simple web app, I'd go with ruby.
Hundreds attend webinno20 (Boston)
To clarify the title, all 50000 people were working as a team in a single game of chess.

I originally thought this would be a pointless exercise, sort of like 50000 monkeys banging away at typewriters. It appears that was not the case. I found this passage about how one of the players effectively lead the team quite fascinating:

"15...Ra8

The results of the vote were a reflection of the increasing coordination of the World Team. Krush was maintaining an analysis tree, and continually updating with all the suggestions and refutations from the bulletin board. Not only did the analysis tree allow the World Team to work with less duplication of effort, it served as a standing, detailed argument for the correctness of the recommended move."

It makes sense that some kind of unified document to keep track of everything would help. It is fascinating to me how much like the data structure you would probably see inside a computer chess program this document resembled.

Next, in the commentary for move 16:

"This sparked loud grumbling on the bulletin board that Krush had "taken over the game". Those who complained were not overstating Krush's influence; her recommendations were selected every single move from the 10th to the 50th."

This was really surprising to me, how much influence her recommendations had after that point. I wonder how much of it was: first mover advantage vs form of coordination vs having the best ideas.
This strikes me as a top ten list searching for content. It's a shotgun-blast of advice: there's a big hole in the wall but it's not clear if there was a target.

If HN were to have a programmatic dampening of "top N list" submission ratings, I would not complain.
Maybe to him jobs can be cool. This isn't the case for a lot of people.
All Blog Jobs - Get a Job
Linux does a great job of getting out of your way after you've passed the learning curve. And if you do any sort of web development you can clone your production stack on your development box without worry.
just remember that the single most impactful, game-changing, and profitable revolution in web uis in the last ten years was the dramatic simplicity of the google homepage...DESIGNED BY TWO UNIX SYSTEMS HACKERS!
You can also use Crossover to use many windows apps on Mac without a VM. Performance is very good in my experience.
Zeroes are the worst. Hell hath no fury like slight unpopularity.
That's cool. I was looking into a Neo myself some months back, but then I read that it wasn't yet capable to do things like make phone calls.
Where can you rent computers from?
If you don't have something constructive to say, don't say it.

ESL classes are now being offered in your community
aww I'm not that mean ;) my parents are entitled to all the free support they want from me, and the same goes to close friends. however, a third cousin twice removed that I didn't even know existed until recently shouldn't expect the same :p
Listening to Your Specs
Upvote for your insight on the QFT thread. I'm not very familiar with quantum physics or 6-manifolds, but that link seemed very tenuous to me.
As vaguely as possible.

"What do you do?"
"I build things"
"Like what?"
"Things that no one really needs but are willing to pay for"
"Oh"

Versus

"What do you do?"
"I work with computers"
invariably "Oh great, I downloaded a bunch of stuff that I really didn't even need just because the button told me to and now I have a virus, can you fix it?"

to which my answer will be

"No because I'm out of your pay grade".
Ask HN: Is there any way to trace a private call?
My fiance has received some harassing private calls on her cell and I was wondering if there was anyway to trace the calls. From what I've read, the phone company may not be much help and I don't want to have to resort to the police.

I've been reading HN for a while and I'm not really sure where else to turn for help, but I figure some on here may be able to point me in the right direction. Sorry if this isn't the place for this (please delete if so).
Simulated annealing moves to locations with lower fitness with some probability each iteration, with the probability of moving to a lower fitness location changing with time and the size of the moves changing with time. My understanding was that the size of the changes and the probability of moving to lower fitness fitness levels did not decrease uniformly but moved down then up then down and up in a humped-shaped pattern, but the wikipedia page disagrees with me.
In response to "Wait, what? Where does it say we're an alternative to relational databases, or MySQL?" you responded: "The whole article is a comparison to relational databases."

Sure sounded to me like that was an answer to his question, and you were saying the author is saying CouchDB is an alternative to relational databases by saying it is a comparison.

I obviously wasn't trying to define what a comparison is, I was just giving a reason FOR this particular comparison.

You need not be so snide, sir.
Hypnotherapy London practice in Harley Street
I went to the London Hypnotherapist Andre Duvenage last month to stop smoking. It was only one session, but I feel absolutely confident that I will never smoke again. At last I have my life/health back (with more money in my pocket too!)
Quick question: how big a niche do you think "software for elementary schoolteachers who want to use bingo as an instructional tool" is? Got a mental image? OK.

Did you think that there was enough of a market for one firm to make $30,000 in sales? Yeah, really. http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

Now what if I told you I'm probably only the, oh, call it fifth largest player in the space?

I look at "tea" and think "Aww heck how would I ever compete in a market that big?!" Seriously, tea is a multi-billion dollar industry. Of course its going to be big enough to support an extra person or three. The surprising bit is that, at Internet scales, businesses you would never have expected to be viable are big enough, too.

My personal favorite Internet anecdote, from the Dot Com days: there exists a farm which sells tumbleweed. Because if you need tumbleweed, and who doesn't, where are you going to get it? A tumbleweed farm, of course. Most of the Dot Coms have since Dot Bombed, but the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm is still going strong. The address is, naturally, http://www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com/ .

My favorite Japanese Tex-Mex place is a little shop in Gifu City called El Paso. They have tumbleweed, for the authentic Tex Mex feel. Stop laughing, the owner thought it was important to look the part. And where did they get their tumbleweed? Well, where would YOU get your tumbleweed -- they went to the acknowledged Tumbleweed experts at the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Which, helpfully, has pages in Japanese because El Paso is far from the only Japanese establishment that craves the authentic Western look.
Beautiful link bait. Seriously, it's a really clever idea. Fortunately/unfortunately Google frowns on link bait unrelated to the core business of your site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild so this is definitely somewhere in the gray SEO area.
You probably do need to get the police involved to some degree. My nephew had a similar problem a while back and the phone company would only release the phone number to the police.

Here is a pretty good link:

http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs2a-cellcalls.htm
"I work with computers."
After having spent the day trying to explain how the web works to a few Windows developers, I am further entrenched in the thought that Windows is for people who just don't know any better.
Suppose I'd have to take time off to get one of them things first. I mean, I was dating someone not too long ago. How long ago was 2006? How time flies when you're fighting a war / building a business.

If there's anything I hate more than made up holidays it's... okay, I can't think of anything I hate more right now.
This is a fascinating site, I only wish the headline was sexier to draw people in to what it's all about.

Daily routines of famous and intelligent people!
Hey PG, on Firefox on Ubuntu Linux all the text on this page scrolls about 2 page to the left. First time I've this on YC. Obligatory screenshot:
http://timony.com/mickzblog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/yc.jp...
Technology, a Geological Force
I actually agree with you that it used to be next to impossible to be down-voted here, (unless you were a complete tool) and now it's a lot more frequent, as your comment ironically demonstrates.
MacFusion was mentioned by tjweir already, it lets you mount FTP and SFTP connections. There's also an excellent port of ntfs-3g for Mac at http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ that replaces Apple's read only NTFS drivers seamlessly with read/write ones.
Best one's are when I get to see there face; i.e. they've used http://www.bubblecomment.com to record their own thoughts using a webcam
Why don't you just block the number?
A-Round Valuations Down 25-50% While B- And C-Rounds Non-Existent
I have heard it said that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
Targeted Languages
Are social networks sinking?
"I push buttons all day." I break down programming into its most basic physical function.
The number just appears as "private." She didn't answer, but the guy left a pretty insulting voice mail. It didn't sound like some kid doing a prank call either. It could just be someone with a wrong number, but I wanted to know just for peace of mind.
Sadly, I think that article needs to be rewritten to conform to Wiki standards of studied, patient mediocrity in writing. :(

>>
The black queen forked Kasparov's central pawns; he could not save them both. Counterattacking with 11.Qb3 would have been met by 11...0-0 12.Qxb7 Rfc8, and the World Team would have won back a central pawn with a favorable game. Kasparov was forced to enter the maelstrom with the next several moves.
>>

Great story but it has POV and citation issues. Here:

>>
The black queen forked Kasparov's central pawns. Chess experts have noted[123] that, hypothetically assuming Kasparov had played 11.Qb3, that 11...0-0 12.Qxb7 Rfc8 was a possible outcome. Some experts[124] consider this gain of a pawn to give strategic advantage to the World Team, others[125] disagree.
>>
other than programming perl, this is the only must-read perl book. its a classic.
Yahoo Layoffs
aka yQuery
Thanks for the link. If things persist we'll have to do something more "official". After doing some more searching on my own, it seems apparently there is no tech-based solution to this.
I usually like to ask: how would you change your favorite language?

You must be able to criticize what you love to be a good programmer.
haskell:

quicksort:

qsort [] = []

qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (<= x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qsort (filter (> x) xs)

fib sequence:

fiblist = 0 : 1 : (zipWith (+) fiblist (tail fiblist))

but don't worry, with the rate at which the java kitchen sink swallows more paradigms, this will likely compile in java8 or something
Talking with some of the Moko folks at MobileCampLondon last year they were telling me about the issues with truly open mobile devices.

Even Moko has a couple of closed components, namely the radio. The carriers and the FCC seem to be pretty against open source software radios for the sake of the networks.

Remember the same networks that carry commercial traffic have priority bands for Police/Fire/Ambulance/Military. Cheap consumer available devices with patchable software radios devices could be a very bad thing for that.
I feel Expose is quite counter-productive.

The golden rule any developer must know: never use the mouse. Multiple desktops and Quicksilver (instead of the dock, which is quite distracting) are far more efficient.
That was probably my point moving to a Mac from a PC is a large investment, you'd need to have very good reasons to do so. Personally I spend so much time in applications/ide's that the OS really doesn't matter much.
My co-workers are big-time mac enthusiasts... however we all run windows at work.

I think his comment on Mac OS and Linux are perfect:

1) "Mac OS is really good for the things that are easy to do on it. Apple put alot of effort into making certain asspects easy and stable. Everything else, you don't want to do jedi mind trick wave."

2) "I've never had problems with Linux, EVER, I know where everything is, what programs start, what is on it, etc... the only thing is I've never used Linux as a desktop."

And of course my take:

When buying a computer, does not matter what computer and for what reason, KNOW YOUR REASON FOR BUYING IT. I tell my friends, my wife, anyone who asks me, "If you are buying a laptop buy one that is CHEAP and accomplishes what you need to do, don't get 100000gb of ram and a Pentium 4 processor (just an exaggeration)." The same goes with the operating systems. Know what you are using it for, what works on it, what works well on it, and who is using it. I tell my friends "you can get windows vista, but don't ask me for help configuring it since I don't know it" because I know they will ask. And to them the coolness and ease of vista does not outweigh the need to be able to ask for help.

1 - Why do you want Mac? Because you saw those mac commercials? Then get a mac and live in a fantasy world.

2 - Are the developers you want to hire going to want to learn the OS you chose? People can get turned off at the fact that they use windows at home, mac at work, and don't feel like learning another OS. Do NOT get frustrated at people asking the same questions over and over about configuring the OS. It takes time to get used to it. Like driving a Honda Civic vs driving a Ford Expedition, people need time to get comfortable.

3 - Do you ALREADY know someone who can support the OS of choosing? If not then your company is in serious trouble. You WILL run into OS problems. I know how to solve windows problems, not mac problems, so if I was to get a mac there is a learning curve before I can solve problems as well as I can on windows.

4 - Are there applications for the OS of choosing that you want/need to use? If you are using eclipse, then whatever, you can run VM to emulate IE6/7. If you care about TextMate like it is your only oxygen supply, then you better go mac. If you want the nifty linux commands, then download cygwin OR unixutils (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/). Don't pick the OS before you pick the tools. The tools are your lifeblood, the OS is your heart. If your heart can't pump the composition of your lifeblood then its worthless and you are dead.

5 - Linux does not save you money.

Unfortunately windows has a grip on us. And don't fight it "just because". I actually thing while MS is evil Apple is 10x worse. So shed those personal beliefs and think what is best for the company, not "cool".