skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Afaik UTF-32 is relatively convenient as it is fixed-width, and thus many operations are faster to perform than in UTF-8.
Should a REST API ever be expose by a form or link?
It's a reference to a famous essay by Nate Silver (you may know him from FiveThirtyEight at the NYTimes) and Dayn Perry: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=betweenthenu...

In short, the A's roster was actually constructed to succeed over 162 games but the compromises he had to make on defense and power pitching to get extra value are particularly fraught in the playoffs, where you're battling the better offensive teams in the league. Of course, the playoffs are a crapshoot (the Cardinals had no business being in, let alone winning in 2011), but the compromises Beane had a direct effect on their heartbreaking playoff losses in the early 2000s.
I agree. Even a 162-game sample isn't enough to get any great level of confidence, but it is certainly better than a 3-5 game sample of the first round or 4-7 of subsequent rounds.

Beane and the A's were mostly focusing on offense, because that's were they could find value. It's significantly harder to find value in pitchers, and pitchers can help damper some of the "luck" factors in the postseason, though it's very much open to randomness.

Modern baseball management is focused on building your team to win enough regular seasons to make the postseason, and then hope luck falls in your direction. If you can couple that with great starting pitching, you can reduce the amount of luck you need.

I'm not sure how relevant the techniques in Moneyball still are. At this point, every team is looking at Sabermetrics, and some of the high-value stuff isn't there any more. For example, getting on base isn't worth as many runs in 2011 as it was in 2002 because there are less home runs hit.
The Greatest [Fiction] Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors
This doesn't make any sense. Billy Beane's "shit" either works or it doesn't. No one is claiming that good analytics guarantee success in small samples, but if properly evaluating talent improves chances of success in a 162-game sample, it improves the chances of success in a best of 5 or best of 7 series.

Maybe you're arguing that the amount of luck influencing the outcome of the playoffs is much higher than the amount of luck influencing the regular season; this is obvious. What it's not is a good argument for not using all available tools to put the best talent on the field.
Commercials Don't Have To Be a Drag
I just sat through over 30 minutes of commercials: http://www.youtube.com/user/adblitz

Coming from a person who prides himself in cutting 8 minutes out of every "half hour show" by torrenting them after airing, that says a lot about the high quality of Super Bowl advertisements.

Perhaps I am slightly biased because of my entrepreneurial nature, but I noticed that a lot of my fellow Canadians were lamenting the fact that they would not be seeing any of "The Superbowl Ads" as our brethren south of the border got to enjoy during the big game.

It just goes to show that if you put some effort into your marketing that it doesn't always have to look like marketing.
Honeywell hits Nest with a law suit over smart thermostat
After posting and reading all the other listings. I've realized I'm one of the few hardware guys on HN.

Any other hardware/low-level guys out there?
H.R. 1981 - Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act
Right. So wisdom teeth, cancer and age-related poor vision are all AWESOME, let's leave those in too.

Evolution doesn't have a purpose. It's just stuff that happened to work out. The fact that really long lived humans don't exist now doesn't mean they shouldn't, it just means they didn't happen to exist in the past and show a particular advantage then that was bigger than the advantages other groups had. It doesn't mean they ever existed, so they may be far MORE optimal.

Evolution trends towards local fitness maximums for given solutions when there is competition for scarce resources. It doesn't find global solutions necessarily, nor does it even get to local maximumums even.
I winder how it well it works with SVG?
Where's the post?
It is a clever (accidental?) marketing, but will the traffic stick?

Naturally, after reading the post, I went to check what fetchnotes is all about and... could not figure it after 30 seconds of scanning the homepage and left.

Anyone else had that problem?
Thanks, I've tracked it down and we'll get a fix in shortly. Sorry about that!
How does Fabric compare to setting up a git hook on post-merge to run collectstatic, etc.?
Because they want to offer just enough for the money to be attractive to you, but no more.
Hi everyone! I put together this page as a fun project to showcase a bit of my background and reasons I want to intern at Khan Academy this summer. Thanks HN!
New Media has "the capacity to destroy civil society"
This is another step down the path toward a partitioned internet. Separate national networks, walled off to the point that they may not be functionally interoperable.

The U.S. and China really got the censorship ball rolling, and there are countless others just itching to cleanse the internet of content they find disagreeable.
"Also, many people will remember the times when they had to use the pen as a crutch on Windows Mobile phones of the old days."

And Palm OS. But the smartphone market back then was probably 1% of what it is now. 99% of the people they're aiming that commercial at have no such memories.
Hey, the site looks interesting! I read your backstory and agree the wedding industry is ready for disruption.

I've been working on a UK wedding directory for the last few months and this might be something I could promote to the wedding planners on my site.
That's assuming the numbers they disclose are even honest to begin with.
Learning about open source by fixing bugs in languages you've never used makes about as much sense to me as learning about physics by fixing engines in vehicles you've never seen.

If you just want to "learn" about open source, read their mailing lists and forums, though you might learn a few things you don't want to know.
I've been using Prototype for years and am now using jQuery more, and I have to agree. The knock against Prototype was that it modifies built-in classes, but I seriously doubt how much that actually matters, and as a programming library it makes much more sense to work with, I think. jQuery doesn't even offer very useful things like list comprehensions! You have to use underscore to get those.
Apologies about the URL - I just realized it is a temporary search result.

Here is a more permanent link: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-1981
Actually, the A's did have a streak of playoff appearances 6+ years ago under Beane's system[1].

Reading the book, Moneyball, I came away with the conclusion that the success of Beane's system boiled down the fact that they started measuring everything and making empirical decisions based on data rather than emotion or "gut" checks. In turn, this let them find value where others saw failure. In a competitive environment with limited resources (players Beane's instance) this system will work up to the point where few, if any, try it--meaning lots of overlooked value exists.

One point at the end of the book was that the Red Sox, when they hired Theo Eptstein as their GM, brought in one of Beane's assistants to implement the system the A's were using. As more teams start using it, the quantity of undervalued players decreases because everyone starts valuing the same thing.

Start up takeaway: Measure everything and make decisions based on empirical results instead of "gut" checks. That's really what it boils down to. I'm not just talking about the front-end stuff like landing pages, conversion rates, clicks, etc. Measure it all, response times, database operation times, network transmission time, average request size, whatever you can get your hands on. Having all that data will allow you to make informed decisions and identify places for improvement to increase value.

That's my takeaway.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Beane
Strategies for Selling Your Stock Post-IPO (Visualization)
Looks like an apostrophe got stripped out:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/what-actually-changed-...
Internet Study: Facebook Fatigue is Spreading
Structure First. Content Always. | Mark Boulton
I just find it laughable that RBS is effectively admitting their understanding of risk management is very low indeed. That their organisation didn't mitigate against the risk of subprime mortgage defaults that would turn one of their main assets into a valueless piece of paper; and yet close down accounts of Smarkets without much of an assessment.

I'm not a risk taker by nature, and Smarket's approach to mitigating exposure/risks is an interesting, yet soundly logical. Bailed out banks like RBS/Natwest can learn a thing or two from Smarkets of how to resposibly manage risk.
"...the bar always wins": Are lawyers evil?
These are not inherently better offensive teams. That's the whole point. The 2002 A's were a good offensive team because they were better at evaluating offense than the rest of the league.

The reason the A's didn't win the World Series is the same reason the Cardinals won the World Series in 2011 and 2006, but not 2004. It's the reason the Giants won it in 2010. The playoffs are a crapshoot. It has nothing to do with whether or not sabermetric analysis is valid for regular season games, but not for playoff games.
This is so late I doubt anyone will see it, but I finally have an answer, thanks to Saul Ibarra Corretge. The missing link is WebRTC - http://www.webrtc.org/

You can set up a connection using SIP (see above) and then WebRTC will provide a Javascript API for making the connection between peers (and the WebRTC docs include various references to ICE which makes me suspect they will work correctly behind NAT etc).

So it's possible with experimental Google APIs today ("Latest Google Chrome (dev channel) comes with WebRTC support" - Saul).
A post from yesterday on the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3551848

Some good comments there.
Also a newish Mac user here.

Played Starcraft/SC2 at a fairly decent level. To an RTS player the lag is extremely maddening as every mouse movement seems a bit off. (to get a good feel for exactly what's off, try to repeatedly draw diagonal strokes of the same size as fast as possible in any paint application for a good minute or two. Do it in both Windows and OSX and you'll notice something feels off about the OS you're not used to)

I tried a large number of things to get the feel right (all the old blog posts said that only acceleration was to blame), but even with mouse acceleration disabled, something felt off. Right now I only feel comfortable using my mac with mouse acceleration set to -2x for some reason.

I eventually just gave up and uninstalled SC2 from OSX. Now I only play it whenever I'm dual booted into Windows. Almost all the other mac users I know who play SC2 use this solution.
Another related quote from the film: "It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life." - Mickey Mantle

After 6 very dedicated years, I am constantly amazed with just how much I can learn in this business every single day.
Maybe instead of "and I currently make ___" you should have "and I have ___ years experience in ____". Or at least have both.
>It simply selects for the most optimal outcome

This is not a reasonable conclusion, and is anthropomorphism as well.

Evolution is the process of changing traits by the process of slightly or greatly more fit creatures for a certain environment happening to survive and breed while less fit creatures did not.

There is no reason behind the way anything is, other than it happened to survive better than the alternatives which tried in the circumstances they were tried in. Things are not optimal at all.
There is a grep method that does some stuff:

http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.grep/
The only real lesson in Moneyball is do what you love and don't let others tell you not to.

What I find most interesting about the story is the different effect it has on people. Business types see it as "Take a great risk and it'll pay off (literally)." Science types see it as "Math works".

The reality is, you just have to do what you want to do and not care if other people tell you you're crazy. Was a situation like Moneyball an exception to the rule? Hell yes. But with out those 1 in 1000 exceptions to the rule we'd have very little to show for 50 thousand years on the planet.
In the case of Google it would be pretty hard to give users notifications, because Google pulls the content automatically, without the users having a Google account, without a reliable standard that Google can use to get some email address or something it can send a message to.

The best they could do is to send notifications to the email address set in Google's Webmaster Tools. This way notifications may be received by at least the webmasters that are aware that their content may get banned.

The worst part about this is that this creates yet another precedent. So Google threatening to pull out of China and then moving to Hong Kong was all for nothing if they end up censoring websites in India.
If you wanted a particular color, you could already do that with the color filter we have set up.
As for things like premium model or navigation, you certainly have a point; we're currently working on a free text search which would allow you to remove any listing that doesn't contain your search string in it's description. Hopefully this would help significantly in the situation you are describing.
Just Click It; superbowl, komen, blog, inbound marketing
Windows 8′s next victim: Microsoft kills the Start button
I like this, because it's difficult to get honest numbers about salary for a given position/location. Entirely apart from the "job seeking" part of the equation, the raw data is very interesting to me.

There will be a fake/fudge factor to account for, but it's so hard to get people to talk about their salaries honestly that it's very interesting to see some raw data there.
Common patterns of markup & style
If they could determine the value of each option (others do it), they could then sort by "best value". With your Infinity G35 example, if the options that you mentioned were worth $1,500, then the nicer equipped G35 would appear first.
You don't think the introduction of the Mac was a pivotal point in Apple's history?
Tomorrow morning, the feds could release Kim DotCom, give him all of his money, apologize, and immediately return their domains, and it wouldn't matter. The site, and the multi-million dollar business behind it, are dead.

I find that difficult to believe. If tomorrow, the people behind MegaUpload were released, and their assets were released, and they were told they could go back to running MegaUpload as they had done so, I suspect they would, and the users would flock back to it.

Your claim is that websites require unique protection with regards to seizures. I have difficulty granting that, because if you seize all of the assets of any business, that business is, at the least [1], temporarily on hold. So, unless you can provide an argument for why websites are unique, then the process you propose would have to apply to all businesses. I have difficulty with that.

[1] I mean "at the least" literally, as a lower-bound. I don't want to get into a side argument about the likely fate of MegaUpload, since my point is that MegaUpload's fate is no different from that of other businesses.
It's worth noting that something like this will naturally self-select people who feel they're underpaid, so you're likely seeing the lower edge of "market rate" here.
Never accept that positioning. Constant stress hormones are very bad for you and I don't see why shortening my life by 6 months to many years is worth them being able to sneak up on me and scare me 1x a week while I'm working.

Move your computer so you can see people and have a flat surface behind you.
Wow, I can't believe how quickly this site activated my inner voyeur.

I'm a CTO (Rails), and I currently make $20,000 in San Francisco.
I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Rails Engineer that pay at least $100,000 in The Bay Area.
Interesting idea. I'd like to see some stats when you get enough data, stuff like number of responses, number of people who found a job through the service, etc....
Actually, pg says just this in his essay How to Do What You Love: "Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive."

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
The Unity UI, deployed this year for Ubuntu Linux, is the canary in the coal mine. Canonical wants to put Ubuntu on smartphones and has developed Unity as a touch-friendly UI - but forced on desktop users too. There has been dramatic resistance from previously loyal Ubuntu users that are either refusing to upgrade or migrating to other Linux distributions that preserve the conventional desktop experience.
I expect that Microsoft will likewise face massive laptop/desktop user resistance to Metro. Note that Apple has not made this mistake - rather keeping two distinct UIs, the first for keyboard-mouse laptops/desktops and the second for touch-mobile iPhone/iPad/iPods.

One can only wonder at the gamble Microsoft is making, especially in view of the reception of Ubuntu Unity throughout 2011. Does the technical elegance of a single UI across all platforms have more merit than specialized UIs?
Thanks for linking to my article. Glad to see my friends at 37signals are fans of Moneyball too.
In the current public imagination, the highest circle of "evil" is generally reserved for bankers, financiers, etc. who "suck the blood" of the public, causing irreversible damage to companies and causing country-wide (and sometime world-wide) recessions. The lawyers are not as vilified as they were in Dickens' time.

"Samuel Johnson, the great critic who himself once hoped to enter the bar, knew better: “A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause” — that is “to be decided by the judge.” The best means we have of discovering truth is to take opposing sides and let them tango. If a lawyer had to believe in the client’s cause, most people would go undefended."

I cannot wrap my mind around this concept, which seems not only wrong in an operational sense (i.e. does not lead to best working legal system) but also wrong morally, which may or may not be an issue.

Can the lawyers on HN clarify if indeed this is the prevalent mentality?
A Call for a Unified E-book Market
Did Steve Jobs ever mention his thoughts on free software?
I read a pile of citations from Steve Jobs, comparing Apple with other companies like Microsoft, Dell, Google.

Did he ever express his thoughts about Linux and free software in general?

Seems to me like he ignored this movement completely. Recall his (in)famous prediction of Explorer/Safari market share where he blatantly ignored Firefox (at the time 2nd) But at the same time OSX is using a lot of free/Apache/BSD software.
uh you're right. I can't change it now. Mods can you change it and remove this comment?
SEC. 4. RETENTION OF CERTAIN RECORDS BY ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS.

(a) In General- Section 2703 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`(h) Retention of Certain Records- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).'.

(b) Sense of Congress- It is the sense of Congress that records retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18, United States Code, should be stored securely to protect customer privacy and prevent against breaches of the records.
Best Buy customer survey details 42-inch Apple HDTV with iOS for $1499
The debut of the GUI to consumer level devices was indeed a big event. I think this was also at a time where huge budget ads weren't as common place (it was directed by Ridley Scott even).
"If you see a stylus, they blew it."
An effective method of filtering out recruiters would be to require a screening (paid for by the company). A few simple checks would cut out 95% of the problem.
Model Created to Map Energy Use in NYC Buildings
Shortening the build-measure-learn cycle with clickable mockups
I'm an extroverted engineer, I far far far prefer offices, so the very pleasurable people don't distract the living hell out of me.

I think many of the open plan office advocates have no idea how much they produce on a given day or not, and don't simply know how much MORE they make in a quiet room.
Thank you for your comment
Well mass production works because a singe product is produced a massive scale. With a 3D printer I can print whatever I would like. Sure a factory could be created that would 3D print things on demand, but I would have to imagine that distribution costs would be a big factor even if it was cheaper to mass produce.
This is really interesting to me, because one of the key differences in the "feel" between iOS and Android is the touch "dead-zone"; Android's is larger, iOS' is nearly non-existent, and this often serves to make Android feel less responsive than iOS.

It's very curious that something like this could slip through into OS X given Apple's fanatical attention to detail, and the fact that they're aware of what that delay means for mobile UX.
Is Your Startup Telling Inspiring Stories or Just Chasing the Money?
Regardless of Apple's advertising history, I feel annoyed by Samsung's approach here. As an iPhone owner, I don't feel complelled to switch phones when I'm insulted. And yes, I recognize that Apple has taken this approach in the past. I've never felt terribly good about it either.
I was specifically addressing the notion that gambling is risky or "low profile" (which I assume to be a synonym for shady) with regards to the "appetite for risk" reason stated by RBS in their letter.
they've been lucky. it might work once for a small, "personal" startup or a company that centers its marketing strategy on being political incorrect. but it also could have gone terribly wrong.
I'm assuming the $20k he/she works at a early stage startup. There are CTOs that are working for $0 and all equity.
Absolutely -- I'm trying to remember the name of the effect(s), but my searches have failed so far.
Don’t Store That in a Float
Getting Out of the Office
As a Canadian resident, I get a sampling of a partitioned internet when I try to use sites like Hulu or Pandora. The effort to bring national borders to the Internet is well underway, and unfortunately it isn't limited to the usual slate of repressive governments. I don't wish to compare my "plight" with that of someone in China or Iran, of course. I recognize the difference.
It's probably at least fair to argue that everything that happened before the ipod was about equally important in the history of Apple.

But it sort of depends on how close a perspective is chosen.
The article doesn't make it clear, are these direct-link photos still subject to the permissions set on them? Would setting a photo's permission to "Only Me" prior to deleting it work around Facebook's failure? If they aren't subject to the photo's permissions, that's a giant security hole, or am I misunderstanding?