skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never understood:

if(typeof document.attachEvent !== undefined)
document.attachEvent(...)

wouldn't
if(typeof document.attachEvent == 'function') be much better?

that way you assure it's actually something that's actually callable?
I have that same feeling about the ruby comunity and its the main reason why I try to stay away from it, it gets on my nerves. About the python comunity, no complaints so far with one or two exceptions.
I also feel the same about ruby being more web focused, it may be wrong but that's how I see it too, one "problem" of python is that there is too many modules and with some variations so its rather hard to know it. And maybe its just me but the python docs sometimes are rather confusing, with few examples (I like to read examples, its a lot easier IMHO)
Thanks for the details. I'm not going to say it was awesome, but it was pretty cool to see our fans accidentally DDOS a service just by sheer excitement. I mostly felt bad after I looked up Ducksboard and saw that you guys are a pretty small operation; that made me feel a little bad. ;)
FTC Shifts Privacy Spotlight From Advertisers To Data Brokers
Maps.stamen.com is live
A must? You clearly live in a different world from me, because in the one where I live, Amazon, eBay, NewEgg, Zappos and Etsy all seem to get by OK with paginated listings. I'm actually having a hard time thinking of a major ecommerce site with an infinite-scrolling interface.
I don't believe you can find a way to enforce patents such that our current system isn't the result, but I'm open to being educated. How would you enforce them to keep this from happening?
Google Hangout with Peter Norvig (Singularity Hub members)
Here's a transcript of Schneier's interview with a TSA official: http://www.schneier.com/interview-hawley.html

It's extremely telling. Schneier does know about the issues, and the TSA official, IMHO, totally fails to substantially counter any of his arguments. Of course, you should read it yourself to form your own opinions.

Sure, someone who works at an airport might know about details we or Schneier don't know about. Well, then, great. They should tell us. They haven't.

I'm not arguing against the inclusion of other experts, whether in addition to or as a replacement for Schneier. Other experts are great. But they aren't being included either. The question here seems to be "include opposition" vs. not. It's not "include Schneier" vs. someone else instead.
It would be neat, but honestly the complexity of a modern CPU is not something that any individual would be able to recreate in a life time if they were building it piece-by-piece. I imagine that's true for any CPU capable of running recent Ubuntu releases or even something light like, I dunno, Puppy.
"'Competitors can't join together and make agreements on price,' she says in an interview. 'We're going to stop that.'"

Yes, I would think so...

If they come through with this I may just buy a Kindle.
This is a thinly veiled pitch for my and Bethany Soule's startup -- Beeminder -- but I think think the Akrasia Horizon idea I wrote about in the article has scientific merit.

Summary:

Akrasia -- acting against one's own better judgment -- boils down to this: we make rational decisions about what to do next week and irrational decisions about what to do today. Commitment contracts solve that problem but they're blunt and scary and in fact replace one irrationality with another. They restrict your future flexibility! But there's an elegant way to remove almost all of what sucks about commitment devices while retaining the benefit: a commitment that is fully malleable with a one-week delay. This limits the cost of an ill-considered commitment to almost nothing and yet fully neutralizes the impetuous, procrastinating self that is forever about to get serious "tomorrow".
Tesseract is now Crossfilter
The Adblock Plus blog details the thundering herd problems they faced. Their ad blocking lists checked for updates every 5 days. Eventually, many users' update schedules would converge on Mondays because office computers did not run over the weekend. Updates that had been scheduled for Saturday or Sunday would spill over to Monday.

https://adblockplus.org/blog/downloading-a-file-regularly-ho...
Whenever you persist data to a backend, say by calling save() on a model, it seems Backlift will handle the backend for you, that is, it gives you a server to process the PUT request and a place to store the data. Then to retrieve the data on the front end, you just do a fetch().

So now you just do save() and fetch() and you never worry about what happens in between.
Yeah. I'm thinking of starting a social cloud computing service called "127.0.0.1". It will use a sophisticated virtual currency and economic model to guarantee that users only get out what they contribute.
Not wishing to be rude but that's peanuts.

Try http://www.xamuel.com/busy-beaver-numbers/

If anyone can come up with any larger numbers I'd like to hear them.

EDIT: Oh and if you think the universe is big and hard to imagine, try considering the phase space of the entire universe! That's the set of all possible configurations of all the particles. Bananas.

I encourage you to watch this lecture from Roger Penrose, Aeons Before the Big Bang,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OutKE3tyG94

...if only for the fantastic hand-drawn overhead transparencies in all the colours of the rainbow. They are a delight and I want to see hipster programmers using them at conferences.

BTW also watch it for the crazy physics.
From a technical perspective they are not the same. Voice has complex/expensive real-time requirements (and emergency service, reliability requirements too), but predictable (low) bandwidth. Data can max out internal edges of a network and over-usage issues.
50 bucks ok? That charity looks like a nice choice. :P

My email is in my profile.
No more weird than the use in your profile: "the moderation system on HN is in dire need of an overhaul". In reality, nothing globally catastrophic will happen if either does not come to pass. Both are really more like "strongly felt personal preferences". Hopefully the usage makes more sense now.
I think that's worth a try :)
The problem is we have a telecom monopoly, or at least a mafia effect. There is no competition to drive the cost of bandwidth down because spectrum is fixed.

Until you can introduce competition to the system, any bandwidth plan will be grossly oversold at huge markup profits to the telecoms, who will be complaining they have to build any towers at all while taking home huge profits off phone rates.
worked for me now. cheers on this amazing project!
Custom T-Shirts for UK startups.
Is there a T-Shirt equivalent of Sticker Mule around thats serves the UK market?

Most Google results come back with shitty e-commerce "we're the cheapest" style sites.
Webkit (and Firefox?) emits live objects via console.log, instead of strings. Nothing is more frustrating than tracking down odd behavior, only to realize way too late that you've had unreliable logs. That's why we don't use console.log; instead we've installed a global logger object which always prints real strings. As a bonus, it keeps a ring-buffer of log messages and on logger.error events, it posts that buffer to the server.

EDIT: Here's a Gist: https://gist.github.com/2210783
Fixed: Earth is known by most humans as the only planet to have Earth-like life.
OWA was crap unless you used Windows IE.
I'm absolutely shocked that someone can defend this code example. OK, you say it's readable for an experienced C programmer which I'm not. But is that really the best practice you want to teach other programmers? Fourfold inline computation? Cryptic variable names like nvtab.nval? No curly braces around a block where they are optional but prone to error if missing? Comments that use deep local jargon (what is nameval, what is nvtab)?

Defend it all you will (and also downvote just because you disagree, why thank you), I stand by what I said: The Practice of Programming is a harmful book and cannot be compared to Code Complete which is much more thoughtful and has unspeakably more attention to detail in naming, syntax, logic, programmer's psychology, project scope, everything.
Watch your back: Apple is already banning devs that cheat the App Store rankings
Google Play bug installs Russian email app on some Samsung Android devices
Why do you think Forever 21 is sad?
Say you’re sitting at your laptop, listening to music while responding to emails, writing code, or reading blogs. Then your phone rings, and the typical scramble ensues: You minimize your browser, maximize your music app, and search frantically for the pause button or volume control — all, hopefully, before you miss the call. Sound familiar?

Wait, am I really the only guy who just hits the mute button?

Cool technology, but that's a strange use case.
The publisher who uploaded the video might care. Especially so, if they are selling to advertisers. Comments, ratings, and favorites are three variables we calculate to reflect how engaging a video is.
Feynman countered this by saying we're extremely large compared to atoms and fundamental particles, so we can "sit in the middle and enjoy everything both ways."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzHQljJ4bc
I didn't see anyone saying this yet, so I'll say it: this is an excellent idea. My wife literally (and I do mean literally) has a closet full (in fact, stuffed) with clothes and she constantly complains that she can't wear any of it, that they don't fit her any more, etc. And this is a walk-in closet.

I don't know if she would like this service or not (a lot of it would, like many web apps, come down to how easy it was for her to use) but if she did, man oh man, would you ever have a dedicated customer. And I bet that goes for thousands, if not millions, of other women. Great idea!!!
Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Very Disappointed
A counterexample is that the Linux kernel tries to schedule timer events for the same deadline time. That allows the processor to sleep longer because the kernel doesn't need to wake up as often just to handle 1 or 2 timer events.
Online discussion of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 to start April 5
I definitely agree with you, and though I feel that this petition can be more eloquently stated and logically founded, I think it's a good way to at least start the ball rolling on getting a proper petition out there. (I didn't start the petition, but as an advocate of NASA, I figured HN seemed to be a good place for this to be discussed.)

As for private sector space, though much of it is currently driven by profits, my thoughts are that if the private sector can lay out an infrastructure to make it easier to access space, then the scientific community has more of a capability to continue research at a lower cost. This is the same idea of how NASA is continuing to send supplies (and eventually astronauts) to space through SpaceX. Eventually, NASA won't have to spend as much on transportation costs, because the private sector will have made reaching space cheaper. Or at least here's to hoping!
This isn't a ridiculous patent. Lots of really awesome innovations seem like no brainers once they're out in the wild but if it was so obvious and trivial why wasn't it implemented on ios from the start?

This isn't an example for why we need patent reform, I see it as making a case for why patents can be useful. Now that some have the fear of being sued for using this technique hopefully we'll see more, even more innovative ways implementing refresh behavior. Constraints breed innovation while lack of constraints breeds a lot of copycat technology.

Now, if you want to talk about how long the patent lasts then that's a different story but I see no reason for this patent not to exist.
"99 ties"?
Just... your idea will never work!!

K, joke over for now :)

I agree. There have got to be a few clever / simple ways of discouraging low-quality hate, without discouraging high-quality hate or moving in the direction of censoring or complexity. By "low-quality" I mostly mean the derogatory and/or superficial ones.

Just throwing some out there... Ask people to voluntarily check a "this is negative" checkbox when submitting, and if they have too many of them show a "curmudgeon" badge next to their name. Or, let the poster have a limit number of "this is infair" or "disputed" points they can assign, that will mitigate the benefit to someone's karma, or ding/label the person if too many people accuse them of being unfair in proportion to their number of comments.

I know, I know, these ideas are stupid, and dumb, and idiotic, and so am I for having had them, and so is anyone within a 10 foot radius of me at the time I posted this, by proxy. Glad we got that out of the way.

Re comments with high-quality hate, they are a strength of HN. I suspect many of the more shallow comments tend to keep them away (people might be less likely to add a thoughtful / informed criticism to a thread that already has a bunch of jabs).

No doubt the future will bring some innovations for dealing with crappy comments. It would be nice if they happened on HN because it's still a great site.

If Dotsies does get anywhere, I may individually contact many of the haters on that thread, just to say "remember this bitter comment of yours that discouraged people from giving it a fair shot?" :)
Interesting Features Of GNOME 3.4
This is a very good article - I have often wondered about this. The choice has significantly tilted in favor of shipping a well-thought-out product with the emergence of mobile apps where it is not as easy as Web-based apps to iterate. You are at the mercy of the mobile app users to upgrade the app whereas for Web-based apps, you could upgrade it for all the users in one shot.
Free Book: Operating Systems: Four Easy Pieces
I had Remzi, one of the authors of this book, as a professor for my OS class last spring. It was one of the best classes I've ever taken. It's clear that he puts in a ton of effort to explain the concepts clearly. In light of the recent submission about XV6 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3753216), this book will be useful if you want to dig into the code.
I had one of the authors of this book, Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, as a professor for my OS class last spring. It was one of the best classes I've ever taken. This book is a direct result of the effort he puts into his teaching. In light of the recent submission about XV6 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3753216), this book will be very helpful if you want to dig into its internals.
I stopped using it because I just hate that I'm logged in to googlesearch and YouTube automatically. While some interesting people post on g+ it's more a blogplatform, the contentarea when logged in is too narrow and I noticed that I am very hesitant engaging in a discussion with my real name, not so on reddit e.g.
Congrats to Ryan et all.
Not sure, I'd analyze the benefits of both options.
I'd think that this service would eliminate the constraint of not having enough room for new clothes in the dresser at least.
How To Build a Cardboard Quadcopter « mike estee
Your recruiting process sucks, fix it
I agree that the article has too little to add for all the ominous sounding words.

But why not make the +1 button private by default? It annoys me that when I +1 something it's public. Shouldn't the total count of +1's be what everyone wants to know anyway?

I mean, seriously, nobody cares what I click +1 on. Capitalize on that.
DNA Patent Database
You are conflating namespaces (a general and abstract concept) with Java packages. While it's true that static methods can have private static (essentially global) data, in in the Java standard libraries static methods largely exist as a mechanism to keep function names from polluting a common global namespace.

And Math is a particularly special case of this. Ponder this: have you ever had to say

import java.lang.Math

?
I don't understand the need for creating their own currency (the "buttons" system). I hope it's something very smart, because these "exchange used goods" enterprises often fall prey to the venerable Gresham's law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greshams_law#Application

I.e. in this case the danger would be that users have an incentive to glut the system with low quality items (defects, uncomfortable etc.).
Good Old Games is relaunching as GOG.com and aiming for the mainstream
Perhaps you're right, but it still is possible that we could see apps submitted earlier the same day as you go into review, thus increasing the likelihood that yours is too. All it takes is a few extra seconds for the dev to paste app info here.

If it doesn't help anyone, no harm done!
Evolution Of Angry Birds On Rooted Nook Touch
Do we need a women-only tech space?
Thanks for both your and pdw's explanations...the lovely thing about C++ is that there's always something new to learn. ;)
At first I thought the naming-twice thing (which I've never done or seen) was similar to the C idiom of doubly naming your typedef structs so users don't have to type `struct Foo` everywhere if they don't want to. I was envisioning a useful application with Node where you might say `exports.foo = function foo() { };` so you can call `foo();` instead of `exports.foo();` in the same code file, but that doesn't seem to work when I tried it and so this "pattern" is useless in that context. (Meaning I'm back to `function foo() { }` and then `exports.foo = foo;`.)
Tech Swagger - A Photo Essay on Geek Confidence
Yeah, seriously. Was it necessary to add "stupid and wrong"? Your suggestion that he go off and play by himself at a new message board probably would have sufficed without that thoughtful addition.
there is node.js... https://github.com/wordnik/swagger-node-express
Your opinion of women on that matter is ill-informed. Where on the web do you see men actively sharing their pant-sizes? Those places just don't exist. Outside weight-sensitive communities like sports and performing arts, size is mostly irrelevant.
I believe it could be faster still. Their Itoa cache is a map[int]string, where it could be a []string.
Also, I suspect that a few more primitive type special cases in the first type switch in EncodeField could go a long way.
Presumably this is to prevent naming collision with the existing Tesseract, an OCR engine. Its generally worth searching "my new awesome name" "software" prior to picking a name.
I knew this would come up. I've even done it. But it isn't something they promote. It isn't part of YouTube itself nor emdorsed by it so you really can't make that argument. The difference I'm pointing out isnt in one's ability to download media but if the site itself was actually set up for that purpose or not.

The next argument is probably going to be something like "well YouTube should stop third party services from being able to do that" but again this is beside the point and it would be damn near impossible to stop it from happening. There's always a workaround.
I'm curious if there are any standards for "patching" vector graphics. So you could download the base SVG and a separate vector and/or bitmap-based patch to produce something appropriate for the resolution. (As well as being appropriate for the bandwidth constraints etc.)

The patch could be downloaded simultaneously or progressively, i.e. after the base image has been rendered.
Only one of the two has a positional externality that cancels out all of the utility.
Did you have a look at Scala?

- There are only properties, no fields or other stuff. This means you can replace a method with a constant easily, or add your own setter to a mutable property later without breaking source or binary compatibility.

- Tuples: (1, "Foo", 42.0)

- val (a,b) = (1,2). Also works with regexes, case classes, ... basically everything which has an `unapply` method.

- class Something[T : Numeric]

- Type inference everywhere, with the exception of method parameters (and recursive methods).

It also has one of the most powerful type systems, traits, everything-is-an-object, higher-order functions, higher-kinded types.

Caveat: Runs on the JVM. The .Net port hasn't been officially released, but is planned for the next release.

There is an introduction for C# developers, if you are interested: http://docs.scala-lang.org/tutorials/scala-for-csharp-progra...
Agreed, the first time I read about Tesseract/Crossfilter on HN a couple weeks ago I clicked the link thinking it was a new version of the OCR. Just to find out it was a completely unrelated project.
Yes, I know Shannon's number is "small". The point was that it's been around for a while, and that with the right mathematical tools one can deal with such numbers without having their mind boggled.
Well, it could be anonymized, or a completely different take, perhaps a DSL for size and fit could be developed. Now that's a CS-level problem for an enterprising startup, "qualitative translation" or something. I'm sure there's entire classes on turning qual into quant.
LOL users care and they notice a LOT..Probably something like 5% of videos have a comment about how the view count is inaccurate.
Does anyone know of a tool that can take a API type schema and can actually generate the API for you?

I'm talking about a simple CRUD type APIs for quick development. Ideally it would have user sign up and simple field validation baked in.
Yea, XMLHTTPRequest was invented in IE5 for OWA, in fact. OWA full finally supports other browsers with Exchange 2010.
Immortality is probably overrated
This is a silly patent. Imagine that you're looking at the months view of any calendar app in existence. Scroll, tap, swipe left? Older months. Scroll, tap, swipe right? Newer months.

Rotate 90 degrees and this concept is novel? Egads.
You sir, is a genius.
I've always assumed that Forever 21 appealed most to the under-21 crowd.
It is just a bone, you can see the same thing on plenty of other fossils, maybe you just have a dirty mind? :)
You're reaching. You'd have a good argument if YouTube was still how it was in the beginning but today's YouTube under Google has been around for a while and has been very consistent about taking down copyrighted videos for years now.

Sure, you can still find infringing videos on YouTube but the main difference is that today's YouTube neither encourages that sort of thing nor does it have anywhere near the reputation of MegaUpload. When you want to pirate some music or video you think of MegaUpload long before (post-Google) YouTube. MegaUpload always had that plausible deniability factor going for it which was smart but why do we keep kidding ourselves into thinking this is just a poor file locker service that gets abused like any legitimate site but is being picked on?
I don't see how anyone outside of Google at this point could have a strong enough grasp on what's in store to come to these conclusions.

I do. I don't believe there's a feature that G+ can add that will overcome the friction of changing social networks from Facebook to G+.

I think Facebook will eventually lose its luster, but its going to be to something completely different then another "Social Network".
Do you really think humans invent different things because they are afraid of infringing someone else's patent?
"... Durkin decided to shut down the Australian site and give the US market a go — So she applied to Y Combinator, and got accepted. ..."

The idea that stands out most to me, is this is the sort of idea and company, few male hackers could make work.
Geocities called, they want their website back.
http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/2012/03/georgetown-talk.html?...

He talks about it here...for an hour...and it is good.
That depends entirely on what "utility" you're assigning to the things in the first place.
Awesome, it must feel extremely good to chop the time down so significantly. Will the customer be able to stop running so many workers on Heroku now and save some cash?
Paul Graham has written a couple things related to the subject of akrasia, namely the acceleration of addictiveness:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

and disconnecting distraction:
http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html