skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Smoother image scaling for IE6/IE7
Hulu Changing Our Online Video Viewing Habits
How the heck do you pronounce that?
Please only consider this as a last resort (which it may be, in this economy).

Here are some notes from my own experience here:

1. Small, manageable deliverables. Always error on caution and honesty, instead of optimism and salesmanship.

2. If your customer (who you should just call your boss, if there's only 1) isn't technical, you'll hate life. You may as well be selling corn futures to a martian.

3. Two new phrases which will dominate your life: Requirements Management, Customer Expectations Management.

4. Find customers by going to user groups/mailing lists for the technologies you're good at.

5. If you have to integrate with any other software system, make sure you have access to enough information/support to handle hard-to-track bugs. The worst place to be is a remote freelancer guessing at what's going on, billing by the hour.
Ask HN: lighttpd and Rhino - Need some hacker help
Yeah, not a news story. But I'm trying to hack, need some help, and can't find an answer anywhere.

I'm trying to get Mozilla Rhino(server-side javascript interpreter) working alongside lighttpd. Basically I'm trying to experiment with making my own little setup to see how well server side javascript as a scripting language can work. Has anyone know what's necessary to get web requests to lighttpd to be interpreted by Rhino, then returned to the user?

Gratsi!
But their living standards didn't go down suddenly, so how does that explain an effect? What changed was trade, which meant the cheap labor was accessible.
Protecting php applications with PHPIDS
In Google we trust?
Not the only one: You can watch Hal Douglas do his stuff here, in an amusingly self-referential trailer

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yXbFuNQwTbs
Gmail annoyances Google needs to fix
>But what is porn addiction, even?

The article actually talks about that.
can http://www.shelfari.com/ do something like this?
5 Reasons You Should Learn About Social Media
By the crowd here, some ideas:

1. High-level programming, probably functional-related.

2. Business/startup

3. Some quality-of-life stuff.

Instead of institutionalizing the topics, we can just start with one good one, and then use suggestions/voting to make up a queue.

My bigger concern is timing. We're all pretty busy.
Visualization Strategies: Hierarchical Data
Free And Ajaxed IMAP Client: Xuheki
Reading articles like this is so infuriating...MANY economists (and non-economist bloggers) have been predicting this scenario for years. Saying "Ya, but they didn't tell us when it would happen, so they are no better than the others" is a total cop out. You would think that in a field that is largely (although not totally) scientific, when leading figures are shown to be so spectacularly wrong, that they might become at least slightly curious of the theories of people in other camps that predicted it. But instead, they essentially say no one could have predicted this. Bollocks. Lots of people predicted this. I daresay only a university educated economist could not see this coming. Any number of very simple mental experiments involving simple multiplication showed that what we've been experiencing was at least unsustainable, but they never even admitted to that.

"Already, the crisis is reshaping long-running debates. It has chastened believers in the self-correcting abilities of the free market - Alan Greenspan said as much before Congress in October - and emboldened those who see the need for more active government intervention."
> Well, it's not causing the proper debates, for example, which camp has the most correct theory? The Austrians told you this was coming, yet you still act like they don't exist, why is that? And as for the self-correcting abilities of the market, that's exactly what is happening now, and the reason it is so painful and shocking is because the natural correction was circumvented several times in the past.

"Today's crisis has brought Keynes back to the center of the discussion, but some economists also see it driving the field into new territory. Up until very recently, the study of market bubbles was marginalized - there was no widely accepted definition of what a bubble was, and some economists, believers in the complete rationality of markets, argued that bubbles didn't even exist."
> Well, can we finally agree that bubbles are possible and did exist? There certainly wasn't a "widely accepted" definition of a bubble, but there were many who defined one, and said we were in one. Should perhaps the people that couldn't decide before sit down and listen to the people that said we were in one so they can learn something for a change?

"Robert Lucas, an economist and Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago and a champion of the rationality of markets, doesn't see much fundamental change coming out of the crisis, either. What it has reminded us of, he argues, is simply the impossibility of seeing these events in advance. I don't know anybody involved who thought he could predict these turning points. Do macroeconomists know as much as we thought we did?" he asks. "Of course not."
> What a disgraceful display of intellectual dishonesty, or else outright ignorance, which would be even worse.

All of these children should be sent to their room and forced to read Murray Rothbard, Mish, Peter Schiff, etc and not come out until they can finally write a convincing essay on why we were obviously in a bubble.
I think the trend now is adding a 'd' to the end of your startup name, so possibly bookclubd? or maybe just bookd?
Compared to how well you're coddled in something like Netbeans/eclipse, it's tough to be satisfied in Emacs. They'll search the entire classpath (not just the classes you've written) and find every match that could be usable in the given situation (according to your import declarations), using your project definition for class file resolution.

On C++, it's harder when you start using templates. Seems only systems with tightly-integrated compilers do a decent job here.
Australia may filter P2P/BitTorrent traffic
Sounds like fun. I think monthly is better. If people suggest titles here, you could collect them and make a poll after a day or two.
I actually lost my breaks one time while driving to work. Like, I totally lost all braking ability. I ran into the privacy fens on the other side of the parking lot, but no one was injured. I actually drove my truck home, and then to the mechanic the next day- without any breaks. The stickiest part was making a left turn going downhill with a dump truck approaching in the other lane! Crazy, yes, but I didn't die. I think 90% chance of dying too high.

Of course, you are correct- your chances of dying from getting in a care without breaks is higher than your chances of dying from looking at porn. But, your chances of being addicted to porn are about perhaps (who really knows?) similar to your chances of dying?

Also, keep in mind that there are things much worse than death.
100% agree. You seem to be writing from India, so conferences and networking may be less of an option for you. If you are truly skilled at doing website design, if you establish a nice online portfolio, you will eventually be able to secure recurring work. But thats only if you are good, you can't fake it, it won't work.
I just came across http://goodreads.com last night, looks interesting
Seriously, if you don't have time to gain knowledge, you're probably wasting your time to begin with. Sounds like a fantastic idea to me, just get the prototype off the ground ASAP.
Thats why you have karma points. The original comment does not add any value.
Sponsoring Video Game Bloggers | 4th Internet Media Group
Lua: A Powerful Scripting Language
At least no one at the company actually reads my e-mails, I guess.

Tongue-in-cheek?
I've tried Launchy on my XP installation, but find it doesn't work as fast, or as intuitively, as Vista (on the same machine). Of course, that was just my experience on one machine.
Why syntax is becoming less painful
Why Java is Most Popular Language?
My comment provides no less value than yours. Anywho, friends?
Report Says Twitter Would Take 36 Years to Catch Facebook
Now, that is a legitimate complaint against Microsoft. I warned customers that lower end machines could not run vista well- especially with 512MB of RAM. But you can't expect the average retail employee at Best Buy to know any better!
The Rise of the Four-Day Work Week?
Beware of Goodreads spamming your entire contact list.

http://outofshell.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/goodreads-or-how-...
It seems to me like you get much better bandwidth talking about books by meeting in person. Do internet book clubs work?
This is actually kind of stupid and poorly thought out. That thank you ad is just that, an ad. It's an investment. Just because a company's having a hard time doesn't mean it should never advertise. Sometimes it should advertise more.

And the American car companies have figured out what cars people want and at what price range. They were selling SUVs before the rest, for example. The problem is that the other car companies can quickly copy them, and the price range is set by the market, which is flooded with Japanese cars of the same sort. The Japanese can undercut them because of their lower employee salaries.

It's not as if the American car companies can't make a decent car. They just can't make one that doesn't cost $2k more than the Japanese because of their cost basis. No amount of innovation can overcome that.
I think the reason is timing. Java took a huge market share during a software boom. It looked attractive at the time because it was an improvement over, but still similar to, existing languages. It also appealed to a perceived need of the time, making it hard for mediocre programmers to screw up.

We've learned since that it's much more important to make it hard for mediocre product managers to screw up by using a language that encourages rapid iteration. However, Java still gets chosen by occasional intelligent programmers because it developed a few robust libraries.
I have freelanced a little, and now my best offers come from previous clients, or people who have found me by reputation. For example, on eLance, I was recently invited to a job which took me four hours but paid $1000. It was invite-only (they did not list it publically), and such a bid would never fly by usual eLance (i.e., Indian outsourcing) standards.

Fortunately, I have a regular income (and besides that am still young enough to mooch off my parents), so I can afford to only take nuggets like that. :)

EDIT: Come to think of it...I never look for a freelancing offer anymore, last I did was months ago. Now I simply accept the 5% or so of offers actually worth doing. Of course, doing those creates satisfaction in my new clients, which provide me more offers!
That could be a problem with third party applications or drivers- but an OS should never allow a third party application to crash the OS- unfortunately, no OS is perfect in this regard.
We don't have any trouble hiring Perl programmers. Maybe it's less about Perl and more about other aspects of the job, in your case?

And oh yeah, I think I am offended by the "it's just not where the smart people want to go" comment.
It's better than Wired's list, which was mostly actresses who play geeks and talking-head hosts of video podcasts.
Startups that are actually making money...not on advertising...
Anyone know any startups that are becomming more well-known / popular that are actually making money (how?) in this terrible economy without depending on advertising? Thanks!
Apparently they've never read their Drucker, or have conveniently chosen to forget.
I don't really think I can agree with your estimation.
Social Media is Relevant
Skype, Ventrilo or something similar might work, depending on how many people meet at once.
bookclubd 1.0 ☆βeta
Get Stuff done with a calendar of every day you commit to an Open Source project on Github
Why isn't there a startup that just facilitates book clubs?

Because the average American buys one book a year and then doesn't read it.
I agree, great example of overcoming throwing sheep.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10045321-36.html
This is really unfortunate, on several levels.

It's probably also self-reinforcing once it starts, because once a mailing list, IRC channel, etc. has a reputation of being populated by abrasive know-it-alls, new members have less of an incentive to bother being civil. Also, people mock-trolling to get useful answers is incredibly irritating to everyone else, which probably makes the overall attitude even less patient with newbie questions.

I don't know of a better way around this, either, but it reminds me of an offhand comment somebody made recently about how once cultural forces take a certain amount of bribery and corruption for granted, doing things honestly at all becomes much more difficult.
No amount of innovation could overcome a labor cost disadvantage? No amount? Ever?

I'm not disagreeing with your main point. But I think you're either selling innovation a bit short or you're being too rhetorical.
Powerbeam steps closer to launching wireless electricity
I figured Hacker News readers could articulate their Vista qualms much better than average :)

1 and 2 are easily fixed, if you don't like the features. I am curious, though- I don't have a newer MAC- doesn't OSX have a desktop search feature that indexes files automatically, too? Perhaps it is better implemented? I haven't had any problems with it on my Vista install, but obviously some people have.
Sorry, I should've been more explicit. I'm mostly concerned about synchronization in terms of getting us all to read a book within the same time frame.
Counter-example: LuaJIT (http://luajit.org/luajit_performance.html), largely because the compiler / optimizer themselves are extraordinarily small.
4. Hacker Porn? [ascii only]

EDIT: It only seemed appropriate given item number 3
Not in the car industry, because the rest will copy any innovation that catches on. I have high hopes for the Chevy Volt, for instance, but I also have no doubt that if demand for it proves significant, Toyota will have a competitor out in 2 years, and they'll be able to price it $2,000 less.

You can't out innovate someone who can just copy you and sell a product just as good for less.
In my comment I offered a clarification/suggestion on how you can use karma points to show your appreciation for a link you like. Your comment did not add any value.
Isocity
Sounds silly to me, honestly. We don't have the same gaps in our knowledge and I don't have time (or interest) to read about the stuff that you're interested in that I'm not.

Book clubs seem to make more sense for fiction where the goal is entertainment or being more cultured or whatever. For non-fiction, my reading choices are much more pragmatic and I also don't mind just reading the parts of a book that are interesting to me. I don't fundamentally want to read more business or hacking books; I want to fill the gaps in my knowledge.
I quit reading when he said recogninzing bad error-code-based code is really easy, and that recognizing not-bad error-code-based code is hard. DOES NOT COMPUTE. A or ~A, for goodness sake.
Interview with Brent Simmons, Creator of NetNewsWire
Please upvote this suggestion if you are in favor.

To overcome the quarrel of choosing a new book each time, how about the highest-upvoted commenter from the previous book club meeting (i.e., someone we all agree is insightful) pick the next book (unless it is massively vetoed)? Or, perhaps provide a list of 5 recommended books, in case a single choice might be restricting the next book choice too tightly.

This both stimulates us to discuss the book insightfully (so we can pick the next book), and it resolves the dilemma of picking the next book!
I think the parent comment was probably trolling, but as someone who loves Lisp I have to say that some people have deeper reasons for not liking it than "libraries". A few of the best programmers I know just don't like Lisp. They tell me s-expressions don't fit the way their brains work. I'm not inclined to dismiss this as laziness, stupidity, or ignorance - though it's tempting :)

If you don't need the things that only Lisp can do, there's not as much of a reason to use it.

This is not an unreasonable thing to say, yet I'm skeptical. The problem is that a lot of the things that are natural to do in language X just wouldn't occur to you in language Y. I think this is a big problem with the way people compare programming languages. I've been meaning to write a post about it sometime.
When talking about children age * IQ / 100 ~= mental if it's under 16 works as a reasonable approximation for younger children across much of the IQ spectrum. So a 10 year old with an IQ of 70 has a mental age of 7, and someone with an IQ of 150 has a mental age of 15 etc. Now we have redefined IQ to have a more mathematical basis but the approximation still holds.

PS: It's not really completely accurate, but you can treat a 6 year old and a 12 year old with the same mental age in about the same way and see similar types of responses.
you can also write Lisp in any language

No you can't. In fact, that's precisely what you can't do.

(Unless you're talking about writing a Lisp interpreter... but then your Lisp programs themselves would still be written in Lisp.)
That doesn't matter. The average American only plays poker maybe once a month, but Party Poker still makes a billion. Startups don't need to target average Joe, they just need a big enough audience to make money, and there are a lot of bookclubs out there.
Yeah, I disagree with that. New is not, in and of itself good. Granted, good and new is better than good alone, but new itself is not as good as either.
TAOCP ,SICP, Lisp in small pieces, Probably the upcoming clojure book comes to stuff that should be consed on the list.
I never by a first-edition math book. The second-edition will have tons of changes due to valuable feedback, along with typically the biggest wave of corrections of any increment in edition.
Indeed: release on the net from a build farm which builds daily, and tests every build, while not releasing any build that fails any test. Works for a lot of projects.
So there are no innovations left to be made in the portions of the car industry that don't reside directly in the product?
>Just one more example of how poorly run the car companies are. Note to the Big 3, spend money to make money. These types of ads have as much value as a Bernie Madoff account statement.

Or maybe even as much value as a broadcast.com earnings projection.
Goal driven performance optimization
Colorado newspaper employees go online with survival plea
Rhino being Java based it's a lot easier to get it running under Tomcat.
Inside AdSense: Light up your site
TAOCP? Isn't that thing like 2,000 pages long now?
You Know Chrysler is Toast Because..
I'm sitting on the domains KNOLBLE.COM and NOVELBITE.COM in case anybody would like to use them. I'm not using them for anything right now.
This should be a feature of hacker news, have a books link at the top menu where you can submit a book and a deadline, then people can commit to reading it, and then everybody can discuss. Upmod if you're committing, then the top few books will generally get a following and a good discussion going.

I guess you could do something like kill all books without more than 20 committed readers or something like that to eliminate the noise.
For the simple truth:

A reasonable analogy might be replacing a 200hp engine with a 300hp engine in the same car. For a wide range of day to day things they only change is their acceleration. However, at higher speeds increased drag comes into play. So the harder the task the longer it takes them to get there. Untill they just can't keep up. For some things there is little noticable difference but othertimes it's striking.

A good example might be an Algebra II homework mistake. We where doing 2 equations 2 unknowns in class which was simple and the homework was the end of chapter quiz. Well I sat down and the first 4 questions where like that but the next set had 3 equations and 3 unknowns and a few seconds later I figured out how to do that. It's seemed odd that the homework had something new but it was easy enough so moving on. The next day I realized I had not been paying attention and did the next chapters assignment. It took the teacher two weeks to get to that point. I remember thinking what are most of these people just dumb?

A more extream example: A few years before that my had an agument with my 3 year older sister and ended up doing some of her math homework. I do recall her say ok yea this is easy. She skipped 8th grade and was the salutatorian and took AP calculus so it's not like so was slow behind or anything it was just obvious based on the questions.

As to the statistics I don't think think there is much point in measuring IQ's over 150 or so. It's not that people don't become smarter, but it's harder to find how generally intelligent someone is. Plenty of people can solve an Rubik's Cube in under 45 seconds, but how long would it take them the first time they saw one? There are plenty of mental leaps that are easy after you have seen them, but they take can take a long time to show up and 3 people might each solve a different one first. According to several people I was 3 before I spoke my first word, but my first words where "Please pass the butter" so how do you measure that?
I'm sorry, I don't normally care about misspelling here and there, but it's really hard to take a post seriously when it spells "Presidents" and "were" wrong in a span of three words....
How to launch a new product
Absolute Columns
There is a keyboard shortcut for moving emails to trash. By default it is "#" but you can use a GmailLabs feature to change it to something else. Unfortunately, it cannot be the delete key. I set mine to "d".

As far as labels go, if you don't want emails that are labeled to show up in your inbox then just set a filter on them to "Skip the Inbox". I do this with all of the emails that come from any company (Twitter, Borders or Amazon).
Toyota has a parent company?

"It's turtles, er, Toyotas all the way up"
Multiple signatures would be very helpful.
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407056
11th grade was when I read Applied Crypo & Practical Internet Security within a few weeks of each other... Spent the next few years incredibly paranoid...

It's mostly under control now.
Well, Its good thing but it seems highly unlikely that this will work. But hey since when did that stop us from trying?
Ask HN: review my app
Hey guys, so I decided I wanted to make an app to connect sdk/api developers to people looking to have stuff built. So I built devjungle.com. Developers can go register which takes a few seconds, fill out their profile and select the technologies they are familiar with and then show up in search results.

I just launched it so it's still pretty raw, needs a few adjustments here and there. Looking to get some feedback from you guys, and hopefully those developers that wanna sign up might find it useful.

Thanks.
How does a first time visitor know what your site does?
Just like the inverse relationship between the availability FPS games and sea piracy.

But really I know you mean this: http://www.slate.com/id/2152487/?nav=ais
Using Twitter for Distributed Fundraising
A quibble in an essay I mostly agree with; the Confucian exams were on "classical literature" -- but also skill with both composition and calligraphy, and the "classical literature" was "religious" in the sense that the teachings of K'ung Tzu are religious. However, they also are the basis for the whole legal system. In our terms, it would be more like a BA in Poly Sci followed by Law School -- a credential some people expect from our political leaders.
Notifications, indicators and alerts (in Ubuntu)