skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, here comes the anecdotal evidence. I think that the light rail will do significantly better than the bus system has - I think that it doesn't have the stigma associated with it that the bus does.

Its intention is to get enough people going from the East Valley to the downtown corridor to take it to lighten some of the loads on the 60 and 10.

I work up at Indian School and Central and will be at least trying to take the light rail from out in Mesa, even though I need to drive 5 miles to the station.

Of course, Phoenix was built as a car town, so I don't think there will ever be adequate public transportation here just because everything is so spread out and there are no real centers of business other than the few downtown Phoenix / Tempe sorts of areas.
For clearity: A' = (A and P)
That's interesting, and I do think that something empirical needs to come into play in order to escape issues with formalism without cheating (Sorry about the incredible vagueness of this sentence). However, what makes me wary of proof by prediction is that it has failed in the past and it is all too obvious why.

At the time, proponents of the Ptolemaic system were able to create a very complicated model that predicted the movements of planets reasonably well (don't know exactly who it was). So judging them by their predictions might have lead to the conclusion that the earth was indeed at the center of the universe.

Also, just try to write unit tests to "prove" that some piece of code is correct with regard to concurrency. What if a particular problem occurs so rarely that it is very unlikely to be caught in any empirical test? What if its occurrence depends on factors that are not well known or hard to replicate?

The problem with predictive models is that they sometimes break down unexpectedly. That doesn't make them useless, but it makes the distinction between logical proof and empirical proof all the more useful.
We support it through autopost right now. Lots of people use it today just for autoposting to that plus Facebook, Flickr and most major blog platforms.
Create a blog and start building a reputation. Interact on forums. You really don't need to go to elance or other such sites.
But wouldn't other outside capital forces emerge (e.g. private equity, VC, etc?).
Has anyone ever run into issues manipulating table rows or columns? I have on several occasions experienced problems with cells not being properly displayed after appending or toggling.
Ask HN:  Input keyword to calculation
Hello all,
I'm new to HN. So its christmas break, and I'm working on some side projects. One project I'm working on is to take some entered text from an input and do some calculations (ie "I bought 5 grand theft auto games"). Then when the user submits this query they might be returned the total aggregate price. Any ideas how to program this? I started by laboriously creating a database table with subject, verb, object and quantity and then some PHP to calculate stuff, but am wondering if there is a more clever way.

Also, somewhat unrelated, but I'm currently studying machine learning techniques for my PhD, and I'm really curious how to implement it for web applications. Any thoughts or resources?
Take care
Also getting various MySQL warnings.
Mozilla CEO: Ties with Google 'complicated' since Chrome
Not a graph, but here's a table of IPO data:

http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/ritter/IPOs2008VC.pdf
Linux: Liberation Mono (already in your distro as 'liberation-fonts'). See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

Windows: Consolas (install the Word 2007 viewer and you get it for free).
What language? What niche? What sort of development? The tactics will vary a lot based on the answers to those questions.
Very random submission. Well, I now know of the existance of "garlic salt" and thanks to wikipedia, I know what it is.
try contracting with former managers / employers who already know you can deliver.
In my philosophy class, there was something called the Heap Problem:

"One grain of sand is not a heap. Adding a grain of sand to something that is not a heap will not make it a heap. By induction, then, heaps cannot exist."

The conclusion, of course, is obviously false, because heaps of sand do exist. But you can't state at what point something that's not-a-heap becomes a heap.

AFAIK, this was still an open question when we covered it in class (2001). I don't know of anyone that's provided a convincing argument for why two premises that seem true result in a conclusion that's obviously false.
Or maybe you're just so addicted to it that it feels like you wouldn't be able to function without it. Kind of like a drug addict feels like they wouldn't be able to function with out getting high regularly.

Just playing devil's advocate...
One ISP says RIAA must pay for piracy protection
I have been using verdana for two years now and I love it.I also use black on grey background, so my editor looks much like these comments.
If you want to get serious fast, go to tech-related conferences. Take a stack of business cards. Shake hands. Constantly. Arrive early, don't eat lunch, stay late.

Be focused on how you can help people's business, even if you can't help them directly. (Don't make it all about "me, me, me". God, I hate when people are like.) You aren't trying to make a sale, you are building a relationship one handshake at a time. Directly or indirectly, you'll find plenty of business.
Do you have any examples? Have you filed any bugs in the jQuery bug tracker? http://dev.jquery.com/
Weird, I thought garlic salt was a fairly common thing. Maybe it's a North-America thing? If it's not to indiscreet, where do you live?
Best LittleCo of 2008 & Most Promising for 2009
Everybody here probably already knows about distributed computing, but just in case...

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

You can also do your part for science, with your idle CPU cycles, or your GPU, or your PS3..
That was my bad! I added some fields to a table and forgot that'd crap all over my UNION.
Also, every image in your TwitPic section appears once as a png and again as a jpg. Some of these are broken but they still link back to the same TwitPic page.
I second this. I like to hire freelancers and their blog is the most important thing I look for. Use your blog to give an honest representation of what you're interested in and how you think. It's much more important to focus on the world of people that you could work well with, rather than the world of people you could convince to do one project with you. That's because freelancing is driven by repeat business and references.
That's very cool -- has it been like that for a while or is it temporary spike?

I remember when my book hit #56 on Amazon for one hour, right after it was reviewed by Slashdot. I was so happy to have a screenshot where I was just ahead of Michael Pollan.
Misread as "SSeta"
Ask HN: How can I make PadMapper.com better?
Hi everyone. Ever since a miserable experience trying to find a place to live in Manhattan a couple of months ago, I've been working on and off on something to help people find a place to live. It's similar to housingmaps, but it fixes some of the issues I had with it when apartment hunting. I was hoping to get some feedback as to what I could do to make it better. I've got a lot more that I plan to do, but I was hoping to figure out if there were any current usability/discoverability/performance issues.

A couple of the harder to discover features:

-Currently, in New York and San Francisco, if you zoom in far enough, you can see points of interest from Yelp (anything rated 4 stars and above).

-Also in NYC, you can filter by morning commute time to an address via subway. This can yield some surprising results.

Thanks very much, and I'm all ears. www.padmapper.com
Like Goldman Sach's private stock exchange? Sure, but as they grow they run into the same problem as public capital markets. Eventually somebody prominent gets screwed, they make a big stink about it, and the government regulates them as if they were public.

This is basically the story behind investment trusts, mutual funds, and hedge funds. Back in the 20s, everybody put their money into investment trusts. They got screwed by the Great Crash, so the government put all these restrictions on public investment vehicles (can only invest in stocks & bonds, can have no more than 1.5% of assets in any one security, etc.) and the trusts were reborn as regulated mutual funds.

Then people realized that because mutual funds were so regulated, they were leaving money on the table, and all these alternative asset classes like commodities, timber, derivatives, venture capital, etc. were ripe for the taking. So they created a new class of investment vehicle, hedge funds, without the regulations but only open to people who supposedly know what they're doing.

Now ordinary people are investing in hedge funds indirectly, through funds-of-funds and pensions, and they're getting screwed. So there're calls to regulate hedge funds now.

Financial markets treat regulation as damage and route around it. Unfortunately, they sink many suckers in the process and create demand for new regulation, and so on.
I doubt he would have had time to sit down and write a full-fledged blog post on what was going on in a plane crash, as it was happening.
It's World of Goo, right? (The title could be clearer, for those of us who don't play).

Anyone played it? I was thinking about grabbing a copy for the boy.
Nice project. It would be interesting to see maybe a "popularity tree". Like for example, it would be fun to see if Scoble or Kawasaki put out the link first and see how it was distributed. Or if someone unknown sent out the link and someone popular picked it up. Not sure if its possible to trace though.

Also, I just started a topic on a data mining related note. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to read them.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406705
Malone isn't crediting Regan for the internet boom of the 90's. He is saying that cutting capital gains taxes helped spur the electronics boom in the 80's. Since we have had relatively low capital gains taxes for the last 30 years, and most of us agree that low capital gains taxes are a good thing for innovation, why would we consider raising them now?

I do think its interesting that, even when Obama was talking about the potential for large cap. gains tax increases, he made a point to exempt "small businesses and startups." I'm not sure how we could draw that line, but it indicates to me that Obama has exactly Malone's general argument in mind.
Always always always turn off error display_errors on a production server :)
http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/fsd/pragmata/. Ooh, a bit Star-Treky.
But the thing is, if it's so cat & mouse does it really matter if they are fewer public companies? That was my point.

It's hilarious because hedge funds are a scam (based on traditional 2 & 20 fees alone). Then someone creates fund of funds, which is a scam of a scam. And people are dumb enough to buy it.
Consistency is overrated. General relativity and quantum mechanics are inconsistent with each other but at the same time they are extremely precise when applied to an appropriate domain (I remember watching a lecture where Feynman wrote down a number with 20 or so digits representing conformity of theory prediction with experiment).
Nice little project, good for learning the API.

You may want to check out http://twitturly.com/ if you haven't yet.
Science Finds God
Repairs Begin on Sea-Me-We Lines
There's a good demo at their site http://2dboy.com/games.php (you can also get it through Steam). The presentation is very slick (atmospheric, with a dark undertone reminiscent of the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and the puzzles are interesting and varied.
Wait. You code in a sans-serif non-fixed-width font!?
Got a screenshot or something public? I think XUL is interesting and would love to do some app development with it, but I keep coming back to worse is better and HTML is good enough.
I skipped maths class to attend rehearsals for the lead role in the school play, and learnt trig from trying to understand how Doom BSP worked.

I also got more from trying to automate Linux than I ever did in those non-practical Logo and Pascal exercises. My school had no concept of task-based learning.
Based on direct observation of some similar projects, I'd advise skepticism about claims of "crowdsourcing". It is typically used as a buzzword to draw attention to projects that don't actually deserve any, and wouldn't otherwise get it. The way this movie was made is likely a lot closer to traditional methods than the hype would suggest.
Yeah, it's referring to World of Goo. It was one of the most enjoyable games I've played in years. If you want to try it out before you buy, there's a demo that spans the first chapter/~25% of the game here: http://2dboy.com/games.php
I'd like it that if the server sent back Content-type: application/json then jquery would automatically put it in json, and not require dataType: 'json'.

And it would really be nice if the "simple" ajax functions also allowed doing something if there was an error.
Thanks ... I saw this one, i liked how they share code. But after Day-1, there is not much explanation on the other code samples.
It is World of Goo. I own it and love it, the game idea and environment are very nice, the physics engine makes the game truly interesting and trying to hit the "OCD" bonuses, which are advanced goals like collect 21 goo balls or complete the level under a certain time, are challenging in a thoughtful way.

You can try out the demo first to see if you like it, that's what I'd recommend. It's available on steam as well.
If you haven't already bought it, you should do so right now. A downloadable, DRM free version is available at 2dboy.com -- support these guys.

Btw, this game was supposed to have a 90% piracy rate.. Though their method of calculation wasn't very scientific.. http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
yeah, I want to get familiar with the basics too.
Don't. :)

Seriously... Free-lancing is harder work than any job you've ever had. You have to be able to handle the work you take on as well as doing the accounting and bringing in the sales. It's just not feasible for most people without really working your ass off.

And then what do you get? You certainly don't have a business, because it's unsellable as such, and it doesn't exist if you walk away. What you have is the most time-consuming job possible. You didn't even get rid of your boss... In fact now you've got more bosses.

Speaking from almost a decade of freelance experience, I'd suggest you either get some partners or get a job.
Freemium model seems very fragile unless you achieve enough visitors to sell directly the ads.

Otherwise you really have to get a lot of visitors to make decent money.
Most of his reasons sound stupid, maybe im just biased(because i love vim) but his list of textmate problems was much more concrete and to the point than the vim one. So vims problems are that its cryptic, its not a complete picture and it requires you to learn a language to script it. Those sound absurd reasons, i think he is just trying to find himself reasons to ignore textmates problems, which is not that bad, i do the same with vim(emacs is uncomfortable and elisp is retarded, textmate is proprietary and runs only on the mac...)
The Big Picture: Roundtrip with Endeavour
And let's not forget the user shared levels, available at http://goofans.com/ -- extending the playtime immensely.
well played and congrats! loving all the success stories coming out of YC. keep up the solid work.
Related: http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
Trying to do this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406705 ...any ideas welcome!
What Sox has done is effectively limit entrepreneurs to non-ambitious projects. That's why you see bright ex-Google guys leaving to do projects which are essentially either copy-cats or mash-ups (hardly any true technology involved, except in few very promising cases).

With M&A as the only exit available, the pay out for any employee other than perhaps the first-five isn't going to be a "home run". Thus there would be nothing for them to justify giving up a higher salary, stability and working longer hours: their options won't be worth much.

Trying to grow the company to post-SOX IPO size would also mean a much greater gamble and much greater time investment. Now the options wouldn't account for anything for possibly as long as ten years (which isn't much shorter than climbing the ladder at a big company).

This means that smart hacker's most economically rational choice is either working for a big company (which issues RSUs or options for publicly tradeable stock) or co-founding or being employee# 1-5 in a less ambitious venture (which usually isn't going to provide very much of a technical challenge).

Not all is bleak, however: it's unlikely that SOX will go (but perhaps I am a pessimist when it comes to govt. getting smaller) but we could see mid-size private companies providing revenue sharing/bonuses (in lieu of options), smarter M&A strategies (e.g. acquirers letting the companies they bought maintain their culture and grow, while offering employees additional upside or even spinning the ventures off for an IPO - but with big co's resources, most notable example of this is EMC + VMWARE acquisition and IPO) and finally markets where smaller players could still have interesting technologies to play with (vs. general database driven websites, which don't really involve much "hard core" tech).
Most of the time with freelance coding potential clients want to see evidence of previous projects, or personal projects So to extend on what others have stated here... network --> work on personal projects --> practice --> ??? --> profit!
I'll second this. Conferences might seem expensive, but by giving you good business leads they often pay for themselves (and then some).
This has "sick burn" written all over it. The RIAA wants to save their own money by asking companies to lose their own. I'm actually rather surprised it took someone to actually stand up and go "wait a minute" before there was any coverage as to how much BS this is.
I don't see why not. You just have to spend a bit more time recruiting the proper affiliates.
I have to admit that I reliably fall for this one, particularly in one-on-one exchanges with friends or acquaintances. Perhaps the best reply would actually be, "yep, you're right, Linux/Lisp/Emacs does suck," but even just typing that now rubbed strongly against my natural evangelism.
http://aptana.com/jaxer
1) I dug up the following table - it doesn't appear that SOX killed the IPO. There were over 150 IPOs each year from 2004-2007:

http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/ritter/IPOs2008VC.pdf

(The question is what the heck is going on in 2008?)

2) Yes, we are getting better quality. If you were around for the fluff IPOs of the late 90s you'd agree. For every Kana Communications there were at least 9 other immature flops like pets.com, etoys.com, flooz.com that died within 3 years.

3) Companies get to choose their own destiny. If they're ready to IPO they'll swallow the $5million overhead of SOX and head out to the market. Those that can't swallow the cost or time will either have to wait or find alternate means.

That said, SOX is still a beast born of a knee-jerk reaction and I'd love to see it streamlined. But there's some good in there.
Twitpic Hot 30 gives is missing about half of the images. There's spaces for them, but they just show the alt text.
This is a good post about error handling and exceptions. I think the title should be changed to reflect that, as I almost didn't bother reading it.

I've slowly but surely gravitated away from using exceptions over the years, for different reasons than the author lays out (though I recognize some of what he's saying from my own experience).

I think the reason exceptions became popular is actually a psychological one: they are easy for the programmer. (I mean the programmer throwing the exception, not the poor sod who has to deal with it, which may be the same person of course.) You hit something you don't want to deal with? Just throw it. It's like the kids' game Hot Potato.

Ultimately, users pay the price for this evasion of responsibility, since they end up with a system that behaves erratically in cases that don't fit the happy path and is hard to understand. In the worst case, the exceptions are just thrown all the way up and the user ends up having to catch the hot potato. (Edit: you can generalize "user" here to include any programmer writing code that calls the original code.)

What I think is going on here is that programming is hard enough without error handling, and error handling makes it harder still. Good error handling models are dependent on the specifics of the program in question - they need to fit the contours of the system and of the domain itself. This is hard, so we don't want to do it, and since we can get away with deferring it, we do.

If you take a look at the author's examples, the code snippet he describes as "not bad" is the only one that attempts to handle the error in place. It's also the ugliest and by far the most complicated-looking. But the complexity is latent in all the other examples too. It's just deferred.
5 Great Alert Tools To Monitor Online Reputation, Favorite Websites
I think "delving" here is used in the sense of going way overboard, instead of just looking at some porn.

See http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/166179
Sorry, should have specified: Safari 3 on Windows. All my tests were on Windows, none on MacOS or Linux.

If it hadn't still been your 'topmost' comment, and a recent top story possibly still monitored by multiple GitHubbers -- or if I hadn't received an ack by this morning -- I would have tried an alternate means of report.

Or, if I thought this was a higher-risk issue. (Your general user-management already seems well-fortified by https against all but superficial mischief.)

Still, I understand the preference that a security bug however small be reported directly first, and I'll respect that in the future.
If you look carefully you'll notice quite a significant price difference.
By that, it was meant that the code would be merged from the separate Cupcake branch to the master branch. This was actually completed a few days ago -- ahead of the original schedule.
The idea of super stimuli was the most valuable, but I can't find much on it.

It's also called, "supernormal stimuli", "supernormal releaser" or just "super releaser". It's defining quality is that it invokes a "fixed action pattern", or hard-wired response. But as you increase the stimulant the response goes into overdrive, or becomes maladapative.

Not everything can be considered super stimulus. But certainly a lot can be.

What other things are super stimuli?
Ask HN: Anyone else want google.com et al to be broken down by host on HN?
Some sites like blogspot.com, blogger.com etc are broken down by host already, but I'd really like to see google.com and a few other domains split up. Posts on code.google.com are different from posts on google.com and being able to see that would be helpful when choosing what to read.
I the near past this article wouldn’t have made it to the top 20 of HN, does it mean that HN quality users are drifting away?
Former Treasury Secretary Says He "Forgot" That People Had To "Afford Their House"