skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the overwhelming genetic evidence for evolution (viral markers shared between species, shared genome, etc.) simply don't count for anything? The fact that non-trivial organisms like E. coli have seen undergoing radical "in type" changes that culminate the in creation of a new bacterial species doesn't mean anything? We've seen speciation occur in short-lived creatures, even above the single-celled level.

The "macroevolution is unproven" dodge is a very popular song and dance right now, especially as Texas is gearing up for its Big Outdoor Criticism-Of-Evolution Fight. But the reality is there is overwhelming evidence supporting micro and macro evolution. It is difficult to reproduce the precise biological conditions in a lab, but science is full of facts that cannot be reproduced easily in a lab (e.g., stellar chemistry is all about experimental compromises. We don't have the resources to keep a vacuum for 100m years).

I appreciate that you may have certain beliefs (be the religious or simply skeptical) that make it difficult for you to accept evolution, and you have nothing but my sympathy as you tackle this difficult issue. But evolution's problem is not a lack of evidence. If you believe that macro-evolution lacks evidence, this is because you have not familiarized yourself with the evidence.
for me, curing mental burnout deals with clearing out stuff in my physical and digital space. for starters, cleaning up my apartment, having a clean desk and workspace, not having drawers full of crap and getting rid of extraneous stuff. in terms of digital space, I'll clear out my desktop, organize to-do lists and order what I need to do and what is most important. I need not expand on this as it is echoed on every GTD blog on the planet.
It sounds neat, but I can't get their examples to work at all.
You're right. As far as anyone can tell, gravity propagates at the speed of light.

We're just not really sure what is propagating, or why. LHC will hopefully finally give us some useful observations on the subject.
Because of the elephant in the room.
I'm pretty familiar with their general messaging and way of doing things - I wonder if the book we'll offer anything new. I abandoned "Getting Real" after coming across countless points recycled from their blog.
I modded you up because I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I think you're being a bit unfair.

Assuming your $80 CPM site is the one in your profile (if it is, what does it use Rails for? edit: nevermind, just read your blog post about your cron bug :p), then it's not very surprising, since it offers a product for download. What would happen if your product made more sense as an online service? If you charged the same price and got the same number of sales, how much would it make per 1,000 pageviews? It would still be a lot more than advertising revenue, but nowhere near $80 CPM.
"Cities and the Wealth of Nations" by Jane Jacobs provides a much better analysis of the causes of wealth. Poverty is the natural state: wealth is the anomaly in the human condition. Most people in most places have always been poor.
"Never send a commited Windows programmer to do a Unix sysadmin’s job."

Classic! (says the Windows programmer learning Unix commands and tools)
Not sure Russia is the best example. Until very recently they were the classic Godless Communists.

South America and Sub Saharan Africa (mentioned by another poster), seem to serve as viable counter-examples, though.
That's just really depressing. Do things like that actually work? I have trouble comprehending the idea of "promoting a brand" on Facebook. If someone was being that obnoxious I would simply "unfriend" them.
It doesn't say explicitly that it isn't compatible with the iPhone (though it doesn't list it as compatible either).
Very strange. Why create a headphone with mic built in that wouldn't work with the phone in your product line?
Why would you use a mic with a nano? Has the nano got recording capabilities now?
i still don't understand why apple won't introduce some sort of trial period for apps. they already have the code signing/drm framework in place and can control what can run and can't run on your iphone. how hard can it be to allow it to only run for x number of days like their downloadable itunes movies?

and even without that framework, there are thousands of non-drm trial apps for mac os x, windows, and other phones that are time-limited and stop working after 30 days or 30 runs.

i understand they are probably banking on the fact that users have to fork over money to try anything now, but can it really be that much more money than would be made by additional sales from users that now won't buy apps before they can try them?
Firefox extensions use too much of Firefox's internals to be portable to another browser. That's why extensions often break between minor releases of Firefox.

If you want portability, write a user script (greasemonkey), not an extension.
The Beauty of Blog Controversy
Though tags and categorization are nice to have, I like the idea of getting a well rounded experience at HN. Forcing visitors to just reading the titles exposes them to all sorts of things they wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise.

I could see myself using categories or tags if they are available, but that doesn't mean it would be a better experience.
I know the feeling. That's actually a major reason why I keep the blog up -- it is probably my best single record of what the heck I was thinking when I implemented something. I find explaining things to other people leaves better hints than my cryptic "Of course I'll know what I meant in a year! After all, I wrote this comment!" documentation.
a few months ago we visited an Internet start-up where the CEO told us a funny story of how one of his developers used an Ad Blocker. He took the developer aside and explained to him that their whole business, his company and his salary depended on income on ads. He explained to the developer that if he wanted to work in this business it would be odd to fight the economic systems that pay for your food. The developer ended up removing the ad blocker.

This is some of the worst writing I've read in a while. Good work. (What exactly is funny about this story? Employee does something, boss says no, employee complies. I guess the funny part is that the employee is wiling to work for a micro-manager like this "CEO"?)

Anyway, I used to work for an ad company. We all blocked ads. Ads are annoying and ugly, and we were not our company's revenue source, so it didn't matter.

I am looking forward to an IE release that blocks Google ads, and a Chrome release the blocks non-Google ads. That will be very fun to watch.
"I recently asked my friends and they told me that you wouldn't be able to run a lot of software without the administrative privileges."

(on a mac) that's not true. I've been using this approach for years now (both on Tiger and Leopard) and most mac software recognize this (ones that don't eventually come around very quickly - it's been 3 years since I've seen one that didn't)

The only thing you'll run into is the minor inconvenience of having to login seamingly all the time (though eventually you'll get used to it)
Hacker news, posting a story I can't go to on linux, cuz its to a propriety piece of crap. hacker news? this site seems like it has become euntrepnurial developer news.
Thanks for pointing out Kohana! I was looking at PHP MVC Frameworks, and really liked CodeIgniter, but wasn't convinced about the PHP4 thing. Kohana seems to be what I was looking for.
Google Buys 20 Million Digital Historical Newspaper Pages
App with a list of checkboxes? Skip repeated clicks with jQuery QuickCheck.
Note: I work in the NLP field.

I'll echo what others have been suggesting, that in this case a restricted grammar with a thesaurus for synonyms and making use of some extant date libraries might be your best option here.

I suggest this because your trigger input is purpose-driven. If you were going to be extracting this type of information from the middle of a email or document content, then I would be making some NLP(-ish) suggestions here. However, since you say that the commands to your application will be input directly by the user for that specific purpose, it will be much more user-friendly and easier (with more user confidence) if you have a pre-defined simple grammar with a range of available options and command synonyms.

That way, since the user is only typing for your application to understand, they know what they can/should type for the expected results. You can allow for a little variety, a little variation in date descriptions, but it should be constrained to a point.

The comments about auto-complete suggestions would work very well in reminding the user what types of commands are available. Have a list of commands (TODO, FOLLOWUP, NAGME, etc) and then when the user selects one of those commands, fill in the other parts of the syntax with placeholders (FOLLOWUP: [in X days|on DATE],...) perhaps.

I'd say that you could add a little intelligence to it by picking up on certain keys from the email to suggest commands, i.e. dates in the email could be options for the date part of the command, and other more complex (and less-accurate) extractions.

But a simpler solution should work better in this case than anything with a more NLP focus, in my opinion.
Awesome! Another book that I'm not going to read.
No one will pay you any money for a bookmarklet. Seriously. That's not a business, it's just a hobby at best.
Girls pictures
Towards RESTful PHP - 5 Quick Tips
I almost took a leave of absence when I was in college to go to work and study in china for a year (learning chinese and working as a developper for a year) but in the end I didn't do it (partly because of money and because of sars)...

Looking back I regret not having pushed ahead and taken that leave of absence because working even for one year in a company makes one appreciate the subjects of the classes in college much more... And I feel part of the classes of college were wasted on me because I lacked the experience to appreciate them
A site that is designed to serve a fresh card everyday, keeps serving the same card.

How is that unimportant? small and trivial technically, yes; but unimportant?
Personal Branding Redux
Agreed, this just seems like marketing spam to me.
Facebook Connect and the Attraction of Web SSO
If you are serious about fighting a knife wielding terrorist then I'd suggest that you go on a good close quarters combat course and learn how to get the knife off someone.

That way you'll actually be able to disarm the attacker without breaking the TSA rules and without having an extra knife for someone to take off you.
So being that this is Rails there are a couple of ways I could have done this (assuming, again, that I cached):

1) Cache the page in memcached, which would give me access to an easy time-based expiry syntax.

2) Page cache. Instead of cleaning the cache with a one-line cron script, write a 10 line cache sweeper. Then, install a plugin to periodically execute the sweeper... or execute it with a cron script.

3) Page cache. Delete with a cronjob.

Why I didn't do #1: Memcached is overkill for my needs, and keeping another process running on the VPS just gobbles its 256MB of RAM even faster, while giving me another potential security/uptime headache.

Why I didn't do #2: Doesn't eliminate the dependency on cron, it just moves the actual delete operation from a single line in the crontab to more complicated Sweeper logic in the app. That is logic I'd then have to actually maintain and whatnot. (And doing #2 wouldn't have helped me if I had executed the Sweeper job as the same user I executed rm -rf as, because it would similarly have been unable to remove the file.)

I might be careless but I don't make choices totally at random. ;)
Tumblr API updated - edit and delete posts
There's nothing wrong with premature optimization. Who knows if your site will ever get hit hard by Slashdot, Digg or the like. If your site isn't up to par, you'll crash and all of those people, and possible ad revenue, will turn away.

The problem here is when you don't test your code properly.
It seems they are relying on the developers to offer free "lite" versions of their applications in order to provide a "trial period" sort of thing. And I suspect this might be better overall for the developers.

Consider, if you released an application that someone might plausibly only want to use for 30 days or less, and then have no more use for it. If Apple forced all non-free applications to have a 30-day trial period, then you may be losing out on many sales from people who only need your program for a short time. (E.g., a city travel guide for a one-week trip.)

On the other hand, surely Apple could let the developer choose if they wish for their applications to participate in such a trial program or not.
Devver.net (TechStars '08) is looking to hire a top-notch Ruby hacker
I noticed a couple of utility providers making the "rounding errors" in their favor. I sensed evil intent on their part. I never thought it would have been a genuine software bug.
Totally agree. Most of his posts are useless. His total lack of physics knowledge aside, most of his stuff doesn't even tell me how to market better.
When you look at something you're not familiar with it looks hard. For a copywriter this would be the easiest problem in the world, but not for this guy.
The hope that pomegranates can defeat drugs lords and the Taliban
"keeping another process running on the VPS just gobbles its 256MB of RAM even faster"

Why not upgrade? On Slicehost, going from 256 to 512 MB is only $20 extra. If you're running a business on it, I think that's a pretty reasonable expense, especially if it can save you even a little time (within reason).
products of large companies traditionally suffer by having to strategically support other products of the same company. This is a major reason why products of large companies often get beaten by products of smaller uncommited ones. If Google has truly decided not to go this route with Chrome (or any of its products), I think is pretty great.
I'll consider it in the future when a virus for OS X exists.
Maybe removing them from the main section would be just the thing to do, actually. I almost always ignore the requests for reviews, simply due to lack of time, but would appreciate getting to peruse them all in one place for anything I find particularly interesting.
Look at it another way. Are there other places that are full of people that would be easier to kill. My guess is yes. e.g. a movie theater.

Movie theaters have a limited number of exits, a large number of people who are conveniently sitting down, and they are easy to get into.

For this reason there are some countries where movie theater bombings were popular who would lock the viewers in when the movie starts to prevent a bomber from planting a bomb and going to the toilet while it goes off. Of course, that doesn't work well if you have suicide bombers.

Overall once you start thinking about soft targets like this you realize that they are easy to attack if you have motivated killers. If you then go down the path of this article and start worrying about those attacks then your priorities are all screwed up.

Would be interesting to know if this writer who worries about a terrorist attack on his hotel enough that he barricades himself in and carries extra supplies and weapons took the time to put his seat belt on on the cab ride from the airport.
Scoble started it, with his "5000 friends" advertising scheme. A lot of people followed suit.

It's a shame. You get no SEO, you just irritate every single person that you're friends with. It's an out-and-out corruption of what Facebook is supposed to be.

If you want to advertise on Facebook, make a Page and be done with it. Anything more is seriously (as the title says) douchebaggery. I can't identify with people who can look at anything at all and see a chance for a slight advertising boost.
The New MacBook Pro is Full of Fail
Let me Google that for you: http://www.squeezedbooks.com/
Songbird 1.0 released
Only a real problem because of this: "one of the deployment steps had the side effect of nuking the cache directory."

If that didn't happen he would have found the bug much earlier.
There's nothing wrong with premature optimization.

Surely there's always something wrong with premature anything, by definition of the word "premature".
I've been asking that for years and have had no success.
A video would have been much more productive for you.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Sorry, mate, but this rose to this level for me. It's someone who's obviously been faced with the possibility (indeed, having stayed at three hotels that have been bombed) and came up with a solid plan to work his way out of it. Interesting and hacker-worthy, to me at least.

Plus, he didn't say high floors. The height constraint is very specifically laid out, including considering how good the local fire department might be. Having watched a bakery fire in Ecuador's second largest city and then watched a pickup truck with a 12 foot wooden ladder show up, his reasoning immediately resonated with me.
AKA Greed.

Not that I have a problem with it, but it flies in the face of the 'on-demand' self-publishing mantra that is preached daily on the web.

And people wonder why pop stars continue to sign with the major labels.
I'm not saying they don't have emotions, but nice try. Nor am I saying there's no such thing as hacker psychology. I have no idea what you mean when you say something like "same psychology as everyone else", My point is that the psychological boost support provides still needs to be actual support.
You do sound like a mac user who has heard too much criticism. That's why I wrote I didn't hear a lot of criticism around me. If everybody was in your place, that simpson episode would indeed make no sense. I am in an opposite situation, and for me the general direction of the humor hit a nerve. This makes some jokes funny even if they are not clever, but as you say, there were also some clever ones.

It's not a good idea to compare the funny things you come across with Monty Python. You may never laugh again.
Netbooks Dominate Cyber Monday on Amazon
Attack at night with silenced machine guns - any luck and you have the first ten floors before anybody realize what is happening.
Google: Could They Have Two Down Rev Years Ahead?
The latest "viral trick" is to have an app that tags a bunch of people in a photo. Not only does the person getting tagged get a notification, but there's a non-negligible chance it'll show up in their friends' newsfeeds.

"So-and-so was tagged in a photo 'FriendGraph.'," etc.
What's Your Vision of the Good Life?
I did a report on that in an economics class. I explained how there are extra legal businesses that exist in all of these countries, they are extra legal because becoming legal is impossible if not overly expensive.

Then I asked the class, who here supports child labor laws?
Most people raised there hands.
Then I said your all wrong. I ran an extra legal business in the US. It was extra legal because I was 14, mowing lawns, had I followed the rule of law I would have been deprived of business operating opportunity.
It's likely we could have made more money self-publishing than going with a traditional publisher. We made north of $400K self-publishing our first book -- and that was in 2006. Today we have a much larger audience, roughly 4x the customer base, a blog that is read by roughly 7x more people, etc. So if this was purely about greed, self-publishing would be the right way down that road. We'd make an awful lot and get to keep every penny to ourselves.

But we don't just want to reach the audience we can reach on our own. We want to reach a much broader audience. We want to reach every entrepreneur, small business owner, or small team member. We want to take our message mainstream. We believe working with a traditional publisher will give us a much better chance to reach these people. That's why we're working with a traditional publisher and that's why we believe we can sell hundreds of thousands or millions of copies of this book.
Nah. There's a lot of ridiculously funny stuff out there. (I mention "Achewood" at every turn I get, because it's criminally unread.)

Your point of view makes a lot of sense. I guess that when I wrote long like I did, people assumed I was making a definitive statement. But mine's just a point of view like any other.
Animoto Adds Some Holiday Cheer To Its Rockin’ Custom Music Videos
I like that tip about talking to the user in the language as the APP expects - hadn't though of that myself.
Software Engineering And Civil Engineering
It doesn't:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Caching/...

Removing them with a cron task is usually the worst way to solve this problem. Using the expire_page method is the correct solution when the updates are being done as a result of a user's action (updating/deleting/creating a record). The problem here was that they weren't being done by a user, but automatically by the system.
Is it just me, or do we hear more from 37signals about "How to do it", than about their products?
The main reason for the difficulties of Pakistanis to integrate into english society is that it is obvious for others that they are frpm Pakistan(or India) even if they have changed culturally.
A person from the countryside of northern Sweden may be as culturally different as the Pakistani on arrival but after he has adjusted his culture and accent it's impossible to tell that he is not british.
What's the Sense in Shutting Pownce?
And the nordic countries, while christian, are very secularized and have the lowest corruption in the world.
Good luck! I am looking forward to your new book. I am also looking forward to when you guys do an analysis of Getting Real vs. UnConform in terms of self-publishing vs. traditional publisher.
They all suck up your resources. Don't waste your time until there's a real virus in the wild.
We are both on HN so if anyone has any questions feel free to ask.
Zipf's Law appears to be a generalization of Benford's Law which explains the interesting observation that the first digit of real word data is usually 1 almost 30% of the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/do_you_know/zipfLaw.shtml
Extremely detailed spec comparison: Nokia's new N97 vs. iPhone 3G
thanks for the link to the podcast, Peter!
Get Attractive People
I have never seen events explode like the ones that have a ton of attractive people registered to attend. Whether you like it or not, attractive people are called “attractive” for a reason. They will draw tons of people to your event. One of the first things people do when they view an event is check out the guest list.

If the event is all guys nobody wants to go. This is basic party promotion tactics and you should be using them on Facebook even for professional events!

This may come as a surprise to the author, but sometimes people leave their house with something in mind other than finding someone to have sex with. Shocking!!