skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want those things you should just use d3.js. It is simply not possible to do that with VML so the Raphael compatibility layer just gets in the way.
Also on a Mac. I had noticed the DMG for the Google Music Manager opening repeatedly, but I chalked it up to a Finder window being open during a shutdown or reboot. Interesting that you can't stop it.

My workflow is the following:

1. Wait for Amazon MP3 special for album I want

2. Buy album

3. Download to Mac with MP3 downloader

4. Sync Google Music with iTunes library.

5. Stream Google Music to phone and browser at work.

This way I have a physical master to use how I see fit. Prices are usually better on Amazon than iTunes store, $4 per album unless I'm buying from a personal favorite on release day. Selection is basically universal.

I've been liking this scrobbler/lyrics looker-upper for the web client:

http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-la...
Yeah, like the guy who was uploading the birdsongs that got flagged as copyrighted.
Wealthy more likely to lie, cheat: study
From my wife's perspective, that's an added bonus -- the UPS store is right beside Starbucks :) In all seriousness, the post office, UPS store, FedEx Office (formerly Kinkos), etc. are all located in places we pass by during other common excursions (grocery store, etc.), so the marginal cost is low.
My usual way around this is to search on scholar.google.com. This usually turns up some free versions. It does in this case.
I disagree. I don't have a button on Facebook for "bookmarking someone." Facebook's news feed has managed to keep the news feed relevant despite massive social changes in my lifetime Facebook usage (everything from high school, to college, to working as a professional software engineer).

A new button will not fix Github's news feed problem. Making the news feed more relevant to users will.
> Sometimes ideas just seem to be 'in the air' at a given point in time.

Yep. Multiple discovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2011-kelly-what-tech-wants-c...
Show HN: weekend hack: bookmarklet to upload images with drag/drop on any site
Twitter allows you to curate lists to filter through the clutter. I think that would apply nicely here. I don't think watching is broken, I think the feed needs some love.
Terse Words: Generating Gibberish in Python - Markov Chains
> I could easily sleep for 12 to 14 hours a day if I let myself.

This is a very common symptom of obstructive sleep apnea. Did your sleep study test for it?
Good point. Returns usually are exception conditions, so one need only factor in a fraction of the "cost" of a return when making most purchases. However, when I order two sizes of the same shirt, I obviously will be returning one of them.
Virtual Javascript Creator
Until they make such a feature, https://github.com/jacksonh/gitmarks

(edit: put the wrong gitmarks project in here, updated to the one I meant)
To Clone Or Not To Clone [iOS Games]
Letting Hackers Compete, Facebook Eyes New Talent
>I find we get a much better result when building requirements based off the customer's pain rather than just giving them what they want. It helps maintain usability by avoiding confusion over additional features and functions.

Exactly. The starting question that you ask the customer shouldn't be "What do you want?". That is far too open ended, and the end result is that you'll get a solution to a perceived problem instead of an actual, workable solution. It's not the client's job to solve their problems. It's your job, otherwise they wouldn't be contracting you to do it.

The proper question is, basically, "What problems do you want us to solve right now?". You want to start with the problems that the client actually has, instead of the problems that they are anticipating. This helps keep the client focused on their current issues, rather than problems that either don't exist, or may exist in the future(but don't right now).
I don't even really look at my feed. There's way too much going on in it for me to really keep track. I basically "watch" repos to bookmark them. "This might be useful in a project at some point; let me make sure I can find it later." Currently watching 92 repositories.
Response from the publisher:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/8517502#8517502

Developer response:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/8518401#8518401

Both of those are from the discussion about the full situation on BoardGameGeek:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/766059/aborted-pandemic-...
Key Techdirt SOPA/PIPA Post Censored By Bogus DMCA Takedown Notice
I think the troubling issue for some is that they can return things for perfectly good reasons, the items in question were in fact faulty, or mis-described on the website or whatever, but Amazon canceled their accounts regardless.

Of course it's possible that those who go online to complain about this are in fact abusing the system, but from Amazon's POV it makes perfect sense: they don't want picky customers who will return borderline goods because it will eat into their margins. It's much more profitable to sell to those who won't notice the dead pixels on their laptop display (or whatever the problem happens to be).
Well I guess the implicit assumption is that the rate of progress is relatively constant - hence proportional to time.
One could argue that a taxpayer subsidized weather service kills private competition. How do you compete with free?

Of course, all those arguments miss the point. The weather service is an important function of the government, we shouldn't have to pay for weather. It's a matter of public safety and information, the property of the commons, not some commodity. Protecting that is the reason we have a government, not to artificially support a Senator's local business.
George Friedman on Email Theft and the Wikileaks Release
(Update) also here: http://www.stratfor.com/hacking-news

I'm George Friedman, founder and CEO of Stratfor.

As most of you know, in December thieves hacked into Stratfor data systems and stole a large number of company emails, as well as private information of Stratfor subscribers and friends. Today Wikileaks is publishing the emails that were stolen in December. This is a deplorable, unfortunate -- and illegal -- breach of privacy.

Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies. Some may be authentic. We will not validate either, nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questions about them.

The disclosure of these emails does not mean that there has been another hack of Stratfor's computer and data systems. Those systems, which we have rebuilt with enhanced security measures, remain secure and protected.

The release of these emails is, however, a direct attack on Stratfor. This is another attempt to silence and intimidate the company, and one we reject. As you can see, emails sent to many people about my resignation were clearly forged.

We do not know what else has been manufactured. Stratfor will not be silenced, and we will continue to publish the geopolitical analysis our friends and subscribers have come to rely on.

As we have said before, Stratfor has worked to build good sources in many countries around the world, as any publisher of geopolitical analysis would do.

We are proud of the relationships we have built, which help our analysts better understand the issues in many of these countries through the eyes of people who live there.

We have developed these relationships with individuals and partnerships with local media in a straightforward manner, and we are committed to meeting the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct.

Stratfor is not a government organization, not is it affiliated with any government. The emails are private property. Like all private emails, they were written casually, with no expectation that anyone other than the sender and recipient would ever see them. And clearly, as with my supposed resignation letter, some of the emails may be fabricated or altered.

Stratfor understands that this hack and the fallout from it have created serious difficulties for our subscribers, friends and employees. We again apologize for this incident, and we deeply appreciate the loyalty that has been shown to Stratfor since last year's hack.

We want to assure everyone that Stratfor is recovering from the hack. We will continue to do what we do best: produce and publish independent analysis of international affairs. And we will be back in full operation in the coming weeks. We look forward to continuing to serve you.
Jython 2.5.3 Beta 1 released
"Perhaps this is at the heart of what's wrong with most big firms."

I think the list makes a lot more sense if you apply it to small companies. Not necessarily startups, but companies of less than, say, 30 or 40 people.

Big companies seem to need to protect themselves against incompetence in ways that small companies do not. So they create more tightly defined roles and Procedures Which Must Be Adhered To, which preclude employees ignoring job descriptions, grate against eccentricities, and are not amenable to fiddling.

If you have a significant fraction of these 8 qualities, I suspect you'll be happier at a small company.
The problem with DNS hijacking is not breaking the Web, it's breaking a lot of other protocols. I dont know which of the issues are worse, but see for yourself:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=nxdomain+hijacking+break+dns
Ask HN: How do you hire contractors?
My company's main product is a REST API and we've just released a couple of API libraries in PHP & Ruby that we wrote in-house. Our customers are starting to write libraries in other languages, but we'd like to turbo-charge this process (and help improve quality)

We're starting to talk to contractors about paying for open-source libraries - I just wondered if anyone had any tips on this process?

Specifically, how much success have you had with day-rates vs fixed-price contracts, how do you define "finished", and how do you cope with project over-run?
For what it's worth, I've noticed that practically every article in this genre is written by women. Is this really a new phenomenon, or is it perhaps a well-worn trope that garners attention? The men are all "losers", not worthy of the attention of achieving women. I think there's a fundamental bias in this line of reasoning, not to mention the lack of actual evidence to supplement the string of anecdotes.
Really, the issue is that the news feed is broken. Even following a relatively small number of people and projects (10 and 29 respectively) my news feed is dominated by the many updates (issues and commits) from a couple of popular projects. The result is that things I might be more interested in from smaller projects are effectively invisible.

Facebook has done a really good job solving the problems of information overload and would provide a good model. The most important step is to group updates from each project. Right now half of my news feed is comments on a single repository. Those should take up only one or two slots.

The next step is to filter according to some metric of "interestingness." This is more challenging, but clearly solvable using machine learning (let us tag posts as interesting or not interesting to train the classifier).

I'd love to see GitHub make the news feed more useful. It's currently the most unpleasant part of an otherwise nearly perfect experience.
For better or for worse, not so "tiny, tiny" anymore: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/02/08/language-rankings-2-20...
There probably is an option somewhere for that. It's just that the Amazon site is so awfully designed and ugly...

(For years I would read how Amazon pioneered A/B testing and measured statistics on every pixel of its site and tweaked out the wazoo, and I would wonder how this was possible given that the site was a chaotic mess that actively impeded me when shopping there - could my sense of what is effective and attractive be that out of whack? And then I read in Yegge's famous Google+ post that this was not true, but the cluttered chaos was kept at the specific request of the CEO, Jeff Bezos. And I went, 'oh of course; that explains everything.')
I love Hacker Monthly — I just subscribed a few weeks ago so I could read it via Kindle, and am making my way through its back-issues (to which subscribers get access).
My proposition is that the watch button means you only see important updates, like when the new major version of Rails is released. The importance should still be decided by the repo maintainer though. I don't agree with bundling commits proposition, because it is not controlled by the maintainer and will not necessarily capture the stuff that is important and present it in a meaningful way.
Thanks for the excellent response. I can imagine how misguided over-generous funding can accelerate research to wrong direction. If I interpreted it correctly, one of the biggest weakness is that not enough effort is to put to verify findings of genome analysis in real biological setup. Is it because funding for genome sequencing and analysis has grown in over-proportion compared to more traditional clinical research or that the need for this is not realized in genome analysis circles or something else?

Btw. Can you elaborate on the following excerpt. Is there specific problems in genome analysis techniques that make it harder to nail down correct variants?

our tools for measuring genotypes are too imprecise and too expensive to support experiments which will nail down exactly which variants are contributing to a given disease
Yeah I agree. Too bad they didn't just save it for the end.
For me (on an iPad), the problem isn't the loading speed, but the interface that blocks/loses the pinch state when rendering new layers.

Zooming in/out stops working and you have to restart the pinching gesture to continue.
--quote--
So I began to aggregate my commits into batches to push in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, that really slows me down.
--end quote--
How is pushing a bunch of commits that much different from pushing each commit? Slows him down.. what??
Facebook has metrics like, how often you browse that person's page, how often you comment on that person's post and vice versa.

But could you apply it to GitHub where all you care about in Project X is Feature Y or Issue Z?

I guess the easiest way is if you could somehow figure out that the pages the User was looking and commenting on all related to one thing, such as CSS issues or problems with C pointers and only display those issues. I'm not sure if that is doable but the people at GitHub probably don't have the necessary resources to devote to implementing this (at least in the near future), whereas Facebook has more engineers, resources, data, and time to throw at the problem.
Skype arrives on Windows Phone
Yep. It seemed that their primary focuses for the study were sleep apnea and then narcolepsy. When they didn't find anything there, the looked at a few other things and then just gave me the general diagnosis.
Assuming this framework is as mature and full featured as Rails (which I doubt), then hell yes this would be awesome compared to using Rails. Also you have to assume you (and other devs) are equally proficient in both languages.

The reasons:

- DRY! Use the same templates/models/controllers/i18n/validations on server and client! I can't underestimate how awesome that would be.

- One fewer languages to learn and switch back and forth between

- Team flexiblity. No such things as "front end guys" or "back end guys" (sorry girls)

- MASSIVE improvement in debugging. Debugging in Ruby is just bizarrely crappy. Really WTF? How is this possible. Anyway it sucks badly but is pretty decent in JS. (assuming stack traces were decent, this is easy to screw up in js)

Plus there are the inherent benefits of using node (arguable) where you could do push notifications/websockets/etc trivially and in a well integrated way instead of having to... use node (or faye/whatever) or running some other server.

Some people might argue that js/coffee script suck compared to Ruby and cite that as an advantage but I for one love js (and ruby but less so) so I don't care.
If you have paying subscribers I'm willing to bet that it's also a lot easier to get demographic data from them (after all, they're willing to pay good money for your efforts), which then makes it (IIRC) much easier to sell higher value targeted advertising. Although possibly the HackerNews demographic is pretty obvious regardless :)

(Almost every news site you go to that relies on ad income will try and get regular visitors to do some kind of survey every year or so for this reason.)
Agreed completely. I don't think a lone up-vote fully conveys how big of a deal this is to me. I've had horrible experiences with other sites not being able to give me a delivery date, or even worse, giving me one and not making it. I called pcrush.com a while back to confirm that ordering with 2-day shipping would get the item to me by that Friday. When it hadn't arrived by Saturday, I called back and learned that they had just shipped it that morning!

I don't think Amazon has ever been late in the two years I've had prime.
Mobile to go Wi-Fi within a year: Cisco
Yep i use watch as bookmark, and as such the feed is useless. There needs to be a Star/Fav thing, and leave watching for important stuff.

I've often wanted to write and broadcast a note or short msg (not a commit), that is deemed more important than a commit, about project goings-on and updates. Would be good to announce properly when there are serious changes or new features. Perhaps done with tags, but it needs to be prominence some how, it is all lost in the commit feed atm.
This pervasive assumption of CoffeeScript's superiority as a foregone conclusion is ridiculous. There are so many excellent JavaScript programmers that choose not to program in CoffeeScript for so many reasons, that it's surprising to see the extent of this assumption. Defend the merits of CoffeeScript all you want, I'm not even bothering to argue with you about them, and _I even conceded already that it does in fact have merit._ However, if at JSConf this year, I start seeing a bunch of projects presented in CoffeeScript, but advertised as JavaScript, I'm going to simultaneously be incredibly annoyed at the presumptions of such behavior while I learn CoffeeScript in order to follow along because it will have crossed the threshold.

My original point still stands that this is a mislabeled title. If this is JavaScript, and I know JavaScript, then I'd be able to understand the code without learning something else. Yes, again, I _could_ go learn that thing and thus understand the documentation as I almost certainly eventually will, but how disingenuous of the CoffeeScript community to refuse to call CoffeeScript by its name, expecting _everyone else_ to learn CoffeeScript in order to treat it as equivalent, when it very clearly is not. Just be straightforward and call it CoffeeScript _because you think CoffeeScript is awesome_.

Why on earth is this disturbingly so objectionable?
Just a note about the website: I got bugged with 2 overlays as soon as I opened the page. Maybe a sales guy decided to do that...? :)
Or it could be due to the mental burden of account-keeping and search, and increases in purchases a perfectly rational reaction to lowered costs.

(Sunk cost, you say? Believe me, I know about sunk cost, and sunk cost is vastly over-invoked and probably a minimal problem in individual human psychology: http://www.gwern.net/Sunk%20cost )
Unfortunately some of them can involve just being easy to work with. A classic bizdev trick: schedule meetings at inconvenient times or in inconvenient circumstances; if the other party accepts, they want a deal to happen.

Similar logic applies to contact negotiations. Which sucks, because being fully diligent is can also set the "hard to work with" bit and kill the deal too.

It's likely that the best way to handle this is the simplest: renice the M&A conversation down to 19 or 20, beneath everything else you're doing; be legitimately annoying to work with, conveying the impression that you don't need the deal because it's the truth.
Also, in this example the writer didn't use the word THE, he was writing in a vernacular and used DA.
It's all good advertising for www.axosoft.com, a scrum project management tool.
I do this in reverse quite frequently. I'm on OKCupid and when I want to find out more about someone I'm interested in, I use Google Images reverse image search (http://www.google.com/imghp) - click on the little camera and dump the img url. I would say about 30% of the time it leads me to their same photo on some other site, after which I have their full name and can do more background checking.
Several people [1][2] are saying they think of the progress bar as bring about how much of the work (bytes downloaded, milestones completed) is done. It doesn't matter how you interpret the bar: what matters is what your users will think, and most people see the bar as indicating time.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641046

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641036
+1 to this. This book rocks.

There's also a UC Berkeley data science class - http://datascienc.es/ - that's helpful.
I don't think d3 or protovis explicitly pack any actual map data as part of the framework, no. But you could certainly make use of the kml with d3 to produce maps.
Try Bronkaid.
But what if you are better than everyone else at coming up with ideas, but slower at executing (say in the 90th rather than the 99th percentile)?

Just as in mathematics, solving a problem vs. simply checking that the solution is right do not have the same degree of difficulty.
Any person that has read much of your stuff though would know cloning bingo card creator would be a mistake. Given what you know about SEO and the time you have spent actually acting on that knowledge it would be unlikely that a clone would ever outrank you. Your number show that even of they did it is a solid business but no path to riches.

This might be different if you made the same product with horrible marketing and bad SEO.
It's ok to be crappy
That name is a non-starter for me. I couldn't show it to my bookkeeper with a straight face. That said:

a) I have this problem and would prefer a SaaS w/ a web hook and API to my current homegrown bookkeeping kludge that I built. My bookkeeper would prefer it, too.

b) As I say a) I realize that I've known that for four years and have never made good on my threats to switch to QuickBooks or anything else.

c) ... And for that matter, I don't have an accountant (yikes).
Ticking countdown for all the pedants from the other thread to come and yell at you for not naming it "Morris.coffee" ;)

Neat stuff -- I dig your defaults: https://github.com/oesmith/morris.js/blob/master/morris.coff...

... and you may want to move some of the helper functions within "redraw" out into regular instance functions, for clarity, and since you're already using a class.
I wonder how much of CoffeeScript's prevalence on Github can be contributed to existing projects ported from JavaScript. Either way it's not a particularly important point as CoffeeScript is a "dialect" as everyone likes to say and not a language, so this will likely always more or less be the case, surprising nonetheless.
From Airbnb to Zaarly: History of Collaborative Consumption Startups
a progress bar for the restore page of a backup program

Maybe I'm unusual. Aside from tar'ing data to tape on elderly 'nix machines, years ago, nearly all of the backup / restore jobs that I've done have been for work - tape libraries, dedicated servers, etc.

I don't _care_ about progress bars, accurate or not. I'm not going to watch a nifty GUI screen for hours - kick off the job, give me an estimate, notify me when done.

People really care enough to make it an item worth that much skull sweat? Weird.
Presumably that's checksumming the decoded output, not the compressed bitstream.