skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I as one of your downvoters argue is that it doesn't take more than an hour to learn CoffeeScript. I don't believe anyone is arguing that it should be labeled as JS when it's CS.

What made me downvote both your original and this comment is that I can't accept that you (seemingly) write a lot of code in JS, but don't want to spen just 1 hour to learn CS properly (I know it takes this short, because I just did it a while ago. I haven't written any JS code since I was 14 - 6 years ago - but started reading coffeescript.org and in 3 hours was able to do everything I wanted in CS. So for a JS master like yourself it wouldn't take longer than an hour to master CS too).

To me, your comment sounded like an abacus master who doesn't want to learn Arabic numbers and multiplication table, because he's too busy. And again, I have nothing against you and downvoting a comment on HN !== hating you and/or disagreeing with everything you say or think.
> The impure Adrafinil can cause liver problems though.

Adrafinil always needs disclaimers, but looks like it is now a thing of the past with Olmifon shutting down production.
Exactly. I don't think a 'like' button would be of much use.
I'd rather see:

Al3x made 2 commits
Project: [message one]
Diff Project: [message two]
It uses Raphaël.js to insert an SVG (or VML on old IE) element into the container. There's definite potential for hooking into DOM events, although there's no code to support that at the moment.

Zooming/panning isn't something I've had a need for yet, the same for data bindings. There's no reason why they couldn't be integrated (although D3 could be a pretty serious job..)
"Mommy? Why Do You Get to Eat Chicken Wings for Breakfast?"
When I'm well rested, well fed, healthy, etc, then the Modafinil just has the basic effect of increasing focus and energy while decreasing breadth of thinking, with the comedown 8 or so hours later that leaves me sucked dry. It's not that bad, but it's not so great as to be worth the risk on a regular basis, imho.
Yep, it has to do with Canadian law and the desire to retain a Canadian Cultural identity (thus we protect our Cultural industries). I don't think that applies any more though--or at least since 2010 when Amazon was permitted to open up a local shipping distribution center by essentially buying out our cultural protection laws with a couple tens of million (I think it was 20 mil).

Books were the first step, and if you notice other departments have started to be available on our .ca-- I assume it's just a logistics issue before they establish a near identical system.

In some ways it's kind of sad, because I do think it will hurt the Canadian arts in the same way Canadian film and television has become second-rate American entertainment-- but the damage is done and with the way things are set up and have been established over the last 20 years, it's inescapable.
Watchers are (often) the people who use the software you make, and the exact kind of people you want to keep interested in your project. They're the source of useful bug reports and feature requests, and you want to keep them involved in the project as much as possible. I completely understand OP's intent.
And what is Path? What is Journey? The website looks nice, but I have no idea what the product is and the website doesn't bother mentioning this.

edit: Oh wait, I see it now. At the very bottom, last thing. I'd consider bumping that part up.
Yes. You can preview a desaturated version to be released soon here: http://mapbox.com/tour/#maps (click on MapBox Light). You can render your own layers for things like POIs and transit stations using TileMill, and we'll be adding those in as separate layers soon too.
Indeed but really, how many encoders does one use? That is, it's not like there are dozens of them that are widely used. If there are only 2 or 3 (say, LAME, some Apple one and some Microsoft one) and people usually use 2 or 3 bitrates... well that leaves quite the space for overlapping.
I worked at Sonic Foundry for many years, and 2 (Eccentric) and 3 (Know when to dial it back) were highly valued and incentivized. Most everyone there were very bright, yet independent and outgoing (and often a bit crazy). We had a blast around the office, but always knew when to buckle down when meeting deadlines or schmoozing customers.

Everyone in Madison knew it was a fun place to work, which gave us a lot of the best applicants. And even if you were competent, you usually didn't last long if you didn't fit into the "culture".
> A. An Overseas pseudo-legal (at best) operation that will send you the drugs discreetly in an envelope. The success rate of getting it through US Customs will be good as long as it's not shipped from a hot spot and does not come in a package.

Very good. I know an online modafinil seller; she tells me that the failure rate in the past year or two for her has been <5%. This accords with my own experiences.
Thanks for sharing. I've recently dived in too, here's some resources I'm using:

https://github.com/functional-koans/clojure-koans
http://www.4clojure.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Clojure-Thinking-Way/dp/1935182641...
HN is an aggregator. It's a link to other sites - there's no copyright involved.
I have nothing to do with Hacker Monthly (bearwithclaws is Lim's HN handle), but I do run Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com) and do make a profit, although a magnitude smaller than Lim. With that said I think we both have zero to worry about.
Exactly, I never took this "social coding" thing seriously, but this "github fan" counting takes it to a new level.
Check Victor's javascript library: Tangle. http://worrydream.com/Tangle/
This is really a problem with Github's news feed, rather than the watch button. Facebook had this problem a few years ago but put a lot of work into aggregating similar stories, etc.
A Different Kind Of F-Commerce
I suppose there's varying degrees to which I care about a project. I do want to know about every commit on the ones I'm actively involved in. On the other hand I'd be way more interested in like high level summaries for the projects that I'm just a user of.
I completely agree. It's hard for beginners to learn that a monad isn't a thing, it's an property that can apply to many different things. A monad is so general it's hard to have a single intuition about it.

I think perhaps another reason why beginners find monads so hard to understand, especially those coming from a math background, is that >>= is a bizarre presentation of monads. I think, for example, defining a monad as an applicative with a join operation would have been a much better idea - most monads, like Maybe or [], make the most sense to me as "containers" that can be joined. The bind operator never really made intuitive sense to me when thinking about a monad as a container with a structure. Plus, to me, m (m a) -> m a is a lot easier to recognize than m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b.

This is especially true since applicatives are now becoming a very popular language idiom. It seems unfair to beginners to make them try to understand applicatives and then make them learn an unrelated typeclass for monads, when mathematically the two are very similar objects.
Improve HTML5 game performance with the open-source Graphics Driver Updater
Agreed. The general case is much better in this regard. The drama from knowing who the players were would distract from the events and any lessons learned.
That might make sense when you watch a user, but not when you watch a repo.
Hm, didn't expect to see this on Hacker News. Better copy over my comment from Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/q878x/modafinil_... :

> Sure, you won't find studies of people who fried their neurons by using Modafinil for 10 years in a row, but that's because Modafinil isn't that old yet.

Actually, it is. Even ignoring all the animal and French experiments etc, Cephalon got FDA approval and started selling it in the US in... 1997? 1998? That's close to 14 years now.

This is why blogs with no comments annoy me - how is the author supposed to find out that he made an obvious mistake? Or for that matter his claim modafinil is more amphetamine-like that proponents claim - well, I'm a proponent but at least when I claim it has little in common, I have [actual citations](http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil#fn11).

EDIT: I checked; it was approved in December 1998, so 1 December 1998 - today is 13 years, 2 months, and 27 days.
Product design at GitHub — Warpspire
Accountability is huge trait for employees and it seems compatible with, "They speak when others won’t." Often a team is faced with err and the best employees speak up, take responsibility and discuss solutions from the lessons learned. In the face of failure too many employees pass the blame or simply remain silent.
Your graph looks great!

We use jqplot, but are looking for an alternative that is also in JS, but more similar to the google analytics graphs. Your's comes close in looks. Any plans for:

a) Inline labels like google analytics, instead of under and to the left of the graph. Makes it so much more pretty, as the graph can have its edges match the rest of the interface.

b) Support for updating data for a live data stream, scrolling the graph?

c) Stacked area graphs (as in just filling in the backgrounds)

Anyone else know of a javacript graph that might suit our needs?

Thanks!
Er, piracetam is usually described as being a nootropic, and substances like nicotine or amphetamines or caffeine as being cognitive enhancers due to the existence of known decreases in performance; because modafinil has few to no known mental penalties, it is usually described as being a nootropic and not a cognitive enhancer.

Stimulant, on the other hand, is a completely cross-cutting orthogonal classification. A drug which enhanced transfer of information into long-term memory and nothing else could rightly be described as a nootropic but not a stimulant.
It serves as a mechanism to gauge interest in your project; watchers correlates to customers.

at least IMO.
You're talking about read errors. Run a ripper that fixes/retries/etc the read errors, and you'll have an identical rip.
Get Free NFC-Enabled Cards for SXSW from Vizibility
Many lawyers will take cases on contingency.

ie, they'll work for a percentage of any payout.
‘Clojure Programming’ book finished
Does WikiLeaks really matter any more?
It's especially magical if you're shipping to Manhattan as they offer same-day delivery. It's such a delight to click "Buy!" in the morning and have it by mid-afternoon.
> Despite what the paper in CPT says, it does have a significant effect on my alertness.

You're not the first 23andMe user I've heard say that; as I caution people in my section on the topic ( http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil#effects ) SNP studies are pretty gosh-darn unreliable, and even if the SNP effect turns out to be genuine (as they often do not), the effect may not be worth caring about.
How to Pitch Irrational Investors
Would you mind expounding on that use of decorators? I'm not making the connection and it sounds like an interesting one.
Google+ is halfway there already: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=nam...
No, that's genocide.

Genocide = Killing

Ethnic cleansing = Expulsion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
Sounds like a brogrammer to me. If I am watching a project I usually give input to the pull requests and bugs. To me watching is being a bit more involved than a simple 'like'. Sometimes I feel like too many projects are based around the idea of "I will only develop it if people are watching it" instead of trying to solve a real problem for the author and going from there.
I don't expect progress bar to accurately predict time - it's there to show progress. The obvious way of implementing it is to split the task into milestones of some sort and display how many are completed. It helps if there's enough milestones so that the bar looks smooth and each one takes roughly the same time, but it doesn't have to be.

Even for time estimates - I don't sit and watch the bar move from start to end. I'll look at it for a few seconds, notice how fast it moves, and go do something else.
That "psychologically friendly" progress bar that starts slowly and accelerates will do nothing but confuse me.
Sprint commits to buying $15.5B worth of iPhones from Apple
Exactly. I've asked it a couple times via email, hopefully they'll do something about it now that it's on HN front page (githubers read HN!).
We often struggle writing for both audiences, and your feedback is well taken.

Here's a brief rundown of the math, more details can be found in the papers linked below [1,2].

We assume a latent attrition model, that is customers purchase with exponentially distributed interpurchase times, and have a constant probability of dying. We then assume that the rate parameters of these two distributions are gamma distributed.

The gamma distribution is the first choice of distribution because it is the conjugate prior for the exponential distribution. For the Pareto/NBD it means that we can write the likelihood function without having to use quadrature to solve the integral. It is possible than another distribution would work even better, though it would likely be more computationally intensive.

Another nice characteristic over, say, the log-normal is that when the shape parameter is less than 1, lim_{x -> 0} = \Infty. This is a nice feature for many customer bases who have many infrequent customers, or many one-time customers.

For the percent error numbers, we picked a representative sample of our clients who had over two years of data, and ran the three models with a holdout set of the most recent year. We then compared the performance of the Pareto/NBD compared to ARPU and compared with picking the year old cohort. I uploaded a boxplot of the data, which you might find more informative [3].

Happy to chat more about the math here or by email (aaron@custora.com). Also would love to hear more about your retail startup and your CLV issues around that.

[1] http://www.jstor.org/pss/2631608

[2] http://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/documents/research/Fader_...

[3] http://blog.custora.com/custora-content/uploads/2012/02/esti... (Note, the boxplot was generated a few months ago from different data, and we've updated the numbers for the blog post)
Heh, theirs has a bigger number and flips much faster. This style of counter is pretty common, afaik.
Any organization that's sufficiently large they don't care about the small incremental income. That is, anybody who's not a domain registrar.

I'm not a U.S. citizen, but the U.S. federal government would fit the bill just fine, and would be the obvious (though inevitably controversial) group to do it for .com, .net, and .org, ie. the problematic ones.
Ask HN: 'Accounting' for startups / product businesses?
Hi all,

Whilst building our current startup we have found that there is no tool ideally suited to recording the expenses, revenues and other transactions within a startup. We've tried a few and, in our opinion, none of the current accounting packages are _really_ working for us.

Most packages tend towards companies that sell product in a store or mail out invoices. SaaS businesses don't work like this.

The ideal solution would let us automatically add revenues directly from our web app via an API, capture expenses from our email or an iPhone app, capture these figures against individual users and allow us to more easily monitor metrics such as cash burn, cash left in the bank, user contribution margins and others that we now calculate with a spreadsheet. All of these are of course extremely useful in making good decisions about our product.

It would make sense to me if this product also kept the numbers organized for our accountant. I.e. it was built around a compliant accounting engine, without the fuss.

We've had a think and we feel that the accounting system we want would treat data entry like programming. Here's a landing page we have built: http://moneeapp.com.

Is there a pain point here? What are the flaws? Let the open discussion begin! We would love your feedback.
Or batch all commits into one update. That way it doesn't matter how much you commit, or push, it's a max of one entry per day per repo per user.

Then, make tags the exception -- since they are likely being used for releases.
Another link to page 2 of an article.
The file download was a bad example. I understand the file download progress bar to mean how much of the file I have downloaded. No more, no less. Next to that progress bar is the current rate and an estimate of the remaining time. This is not what frustrates me. What frustrates me is a progress bar for an installation task that sits at 99% or 100% for about the same amount of time it took to get there in the first place. I'm skeptical that this kind of problem happens merely because the last task happens to be unpredictably long every single time.

I'm betting most of the problems are less about variance in execution time and more about measuring the right tasks at the right granularity.
I would really appreciate it if notifications were aggregated by thread and updates by project.

I generally only care that a thread/project was updated. If I'm interested, I'll go in and look at what's new. Letting me know more than once just makes it harder to actually keep track of things you care about.
I think you're looking for this: http://clojurescriptone.com/
I have never used my dashboard, because I watch so many repos. I use it as a bookmark function, but it'd be great if they replaced it with "bookmark" with a default option of not "following" the updates.

There are a lot of interesting projects, but I only want to follow those immediately relevant to what I am doing.
Ask HN: team based "to done" lists?
I'm looking into improving the team happiness in a team that actually get's done and achieves much, but doesn't feel so. My idea was to use a "to done list" for some time, but ideally wanted to use a nicely designed tool for it where everybody can add his items and see what the others entered. Any tips?
Please keep the success of HNM in mind the next time you hear "Pfft, who pays for information you could find free on the Internet." HN readers just like you also do all sorts of weird things like paying money for software, paying money for services, paying money for media, etc etc.

Also might be salutary to remember if sentiment runs, say, 10-1 against doing an idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499

Congrats on the success, by the way.
Chrome Apps can use non-standard technologies (WebSQL, for example; and soon Dart), so they won't work in other browsers. In fact, some of those nonstandard technologies won't even work on Chrome when running on another type of device (NaCl apps will not run on ARM).
Agreed. There are many times I just want to sort favorite repositories that I want to refer to later. I've thought many times about building this using the Github API (like what Favoritizer does for Etsy) but then you would have a whole different website for browsing github.
I think you'll have a hard time running their documentation through the Coffeescript compiler.
Totally agree, and I'll add that in my experience non-scientists frequently conflate "reproducible" with "verifiable". Simply downloading a data set and code, and rerunning it, is not really a scientific endeavor. To verify a scientific conclusion, other scientists need to design and run their own, independent experiments aimed at testing the same hypothesis. That said, it seems true that open source code can go a long way toward making that possible by reducing ambiguity about what, exactly, was being tested, and how.
Thanks for posting this, saved. The video it points to is also looking quite kickass too.

http://www.axosoft.com/ontime/videos/scrum
I put tape on it, and I plan on getting a vinyl sticker for my MacBook, but unless I decide to specifically design one, it's going to look ridiculous.
IMO the one who watches should be able to control which updates he sees in his feed, not the project developer (which is what the article and may commenters suggest). For some projects I'm watching I'd like to see every commit, issue update, etcetera. For others I'd only be interested in new tags that are created. The project developers don't know what I'm interested in. Only I know.
Really? A dark share button taking away screen real estate? Are you out of your freaking mind?

Also, preload tiles so I don't get ugly white boxes for just midly steering out of my current viewbox.
France's new drunk driving legislation - every car to carry a breathalyzer
I find that what I take the # of GitHub watchers to mean (i.e. the popularity of a project) is better surfaced by the number of downloads on RubyGems.org, at least for gems.

Better yet, RubyGems collects that information without any user input.

It would be awesome if the # of downloads could be shown on a GitHub project page.
Yes. This. I "watch" a lot of projects in lieu of favoriting them and because of how "watching" pollutes the timeline, I find the timeline totally useless.

In theory I could just bookmark them using my normal system with a tag of "github" or something but the "Watched Repositories" widget is too useful to miss.
This is a very real problem, but I'd argue it's a problem from the side of the watcher rather than the watched. As a GitHub user, there are two kinds of repos I care about: projects I'm active in, and projects I'm vaguely interested in and might be interested in keeping an eye on. For the first group, I want constant notifications. Let me know anytime anyone does anything. For the latter, I don't care, and probably actively don't want notifications.

Right now, GitHub groups both of these use cases into the same 'Watch' functionality.
Um. Like. I'm sure you're right? But in practice, single-character substitution ciphers are so trivial to solve that you can more or less try "E", then space, then maybe "T" and have it.

You don't even need to know what a "trigram" is to solve single character substitution over English text; if you couldn't do it in a job interview in code on a whiteboard here, that'd be a "NO HIRE".

Also note that the "most efficient" ways of "breaking" (strange word to use when we're talking about Carmen Sandiego-grade ciphers) ciphers aren't always the best. For instance, the best way I know to break multi-character substitution in web apps is comically inefficient (in terms of ciphertexts required), but fits in just a couple lines of code.
Wow, a lot of people are really defensive about coffeescript.
It seems to me that a modern operating system, which might be used on several different networks throughout the day, and which may offer a variety of different hardware configurations, should be able to provide information to applications which could be useful in calculating this sort of thing. Things like latency, typical data throughput (network and local storage), etc.
I spent a good chunk of my sunday yesterday with my cofounder playing with g.raphael.js. After some frustration with raphael and concerns of a giant rabbit hole, we ended up planning to go with Highcharts. The $360 per developer license felt a little steep. We're still experimenting and Morris looks awesome.

Thanks for sharing. We may be forking and pull-requesting soon.
Well, there's also the responsibility thing: if I have (say), 10K watchers, I would feel responsible to keep mySweetProject running and maintained. Whereas if there were 0 watchers, I'd feel fine about ignoring it.

I totally agree with the other poster in this thread that said the idea of "following" and "hey this is a neat project" is conflated in github. I'd like to favourite projects for further observation/interest, but I have no real desire to watch their progress day by day.
This is what happens when collaboration tools are turned on their head and used as as popularity contest.
It'll probably look odd, just like everything on an old computer. Designing for the craziest CRT is just as bad or worse than designing for a cinema display.