skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it has a significant community, have meetups with an entry fee with prizes, etc. Get sponsored prizes. Make a Facebook app (increased ad revenue). Honestly, I don't see it being incredibly profitable, but it is a neat idea.
Are you arguing that no seatbelt is better than a paper seatbelt?

Just because the seatbelt is broken, doesn't mean we should abandon seatbelts. It means we should work harder to make better seatbelts.

An argument I see when libertarians are faced with such questions is that libertarians aren't 'against' seatbelts, but they want to explore the alternatives. And yet they don't seem to come up with any other alternatives...
always, especially when there's 0 comment so i can be the frist!!!

just kidding, seriously, i check the people and how deep the comments' tree is first

if it's too deep, there's high chance of two person fight or grammar nazi in action

if it's too shallow, the article is not interesting

i like 3 levels deep (5 at most)
If you want training, I recommend books (which teach you very efficiently).

If you want the latest tips, tricks, and ways of thinking, then I recommend blogs (which are highly inefficient).
I think it's fine as is. I often scan the comments (not just reading the first one). I'd bet most of the comment readers do the same.
>Is there enough fun in the universe, sufficiently accessible, for a transhuman to jog off the hedonic treadmill - improve their life continuously, at a sufficient rate to leap to an even higher hedonic level before they had a chance to get bored with the previous one?

>Assume that a microgram of additional neurotransmitters are released in the pleasure centers during a standard human orgasm. And assume that neurotransmitters have the same density as water. Then an orgasm can reach around 108 solar masses before it collapses and forms a black hole, corresponding to 1047 baseline orgasms. If we assume that a 100mg dose of crack is as pleasurable as 10 standard orgasms, then the street value of your last orgasm is around a hundred billion trillion trillion trillion dollars.
50/50.
Real hackers use anarcho-capitalism.
sometimes i get worried that i'm not as good at thinking for myself as i used to be before the web2.0 "voices in my head".
Yes - but generally only on HN due to the quality of the comments. If I was to do it at reddit or digg, it is purely for humour value.
Free programming tips are worth every penny
Buy Term Life Insurance, Online Application, No Exam, Quick Approval for Cheap Insurance.
JQuery 1.3rc1 released, probably final
You've hit on one of the major reasons why the Internet is worse than TV, as far as time-wasters go. TV gets old after a while and is unfulfilling. The Internet devises new ways of hitting new reward receptors every second, and the possibilities are infinite. Sick of reading? You can write. (Comments, blogs, Wikipedia).

I've often thought of Internet addiction as being more like an overeating problem than a drug problem. You can give up cigarettes or opiates cold turkey, but no one can stop eating. In order to be productive as a programmer, you must daily engage your vice.
Sounds like rubbish to me, but naively speaking:

If a 2000w kettle takes 2 minutes to boil it uses 2000w x (2/60) hrs = 66.67 watt-hours.

If a google search requires my laptop at 150w, 10 network appliances at 200w and 10 google servers at 200w and front to back a query takes 1 second then a query uses 4150w x (1/60/60) hrs = 1.16 watt-hours.

Or have I got that wrong?
One interesting model of where spreadseets may go is Resolver, at http://code.google.com/p/resolver/ or http://www.resolversystems.com/. Most of the issues complained about here can be solved through the Python back end.
Are you surprised by bad science reporting?

I mean we must have 10,000 cures for cancer by now ;-)

PS: There is a fair amount of global cooling due to particulate matter in the air. However, while CO2 sticks around particulate matter tends to end up as dust.
CatDancer, the problem is that the system can't always know what you intended: should the range be "greedy" and jump to incorporate the new numbers as you append them, or should it be "strict" and keep to the boundaries you originally gave it? Sometimes the latter behavior is what is desired, and expanding to C2:C11 would be wrong in that case. So what's really needed here is a lightweight way to communicate your intention to the system. (Actually, you can do this in Excel - http://tinyurl.com/26b78 - but it's far from lightweight.)

I'm assuming that (in terms of your example) the invoice amounts that you're adding up would form a contiguous range of numbers, and that this range would be bounded by whitespace. That is, you might have some other range that used column C -- say "expenses" -- but it would be lower down, say starting at C15, and there would be at least one blank cell between the two. Is that correct? If it weren't for that lower range, you could just take the sum of the whole column and you'd be good. But it's too inconvenient (and not the "spreadsheet way") to force everything into separate columns.

If the above is correct, how would you feel about being able to define a range with a notation like this: "C2:C✱", meaning "the range of cells that starts at C2 and goes down until it hits whitespace"? Then as you add numbers to C11, C12, etc., the range would automatically expand to include them. But you'd still have to be careful to ensure there was a "moat" of whitespace around your invoice range. If you filled in the last non-whitespace cell before your other table, you'd now have connected the two tables in such a way that "C2:C✱" would leap down to the end of the second table. In other words you'd be lumping "invoices" together with "expenses" which is probably incorrect.
You could setup a project on Amazon Mechanical Turk or use some service that offers a management layer on top of it like UserTesting.com.
They must be very good, if they are expected to come up with something within a few months that will be able to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft Office and Open Office.

I can't wait to see it.
Maybe obsolete isn't the word, but the language is showing it's age and heritage. I've worked with Java almost since it's inception and since I've started looking at Ruby and RoR, Java just seems cumbersome to work with and it takes so much code to get anything done!
A simple economic case against bailouts
One feature I've always liked is when forums set the mouse over text to display the first n lines of the post. Makes it much faster to figure out if you want to read a topic if the title doesn't contain enough information. Also doesn't clutter the display of the page, because visually it's no different. Of course, given that editors can edit the titles of submissions on HN this is less of a problem.
No. I've got several Heroku apps going and none of them incur any costs what-so-ever. You can ask them to "bless" an app and they will give it more CPU. They might start charging for this based on this blog post.

Overall, Heroku is extremely nice to work with. Sometimes your app stops responding and you have to dig up one of the founder's e-mails (because the mailing list receives no response), but the technology is sound and the editor is wonderful. The Git integration is handy, and it's very easy to create new apps when you suddenly have an idea on a Sunday evening.
The idea of a loan, is that you'll pay it back at some point.
Can't you accomplish #2 via Sharepoint or Office Online? I know there are some options if you click Windows Logo > Publish in Excel 2007.
Why don't you have a mission about how Daily Mission can make money?
My pet theory is that playing a musical instrument is less common a hobby among programmers now than it was a generation ago, because now programming tends to be associated with "Computer Science" as its own discipline, rather than a subdiscipline of math.

I'd say you have that backwards. Mathematicians and Computer Scientists have always been interested in music; but Programmers haven't. These days if you look around a computer science department -- at least, if you look at the students -- you'll be looking mostly at programmers, not at computer scientists.

When I was in Oxford, I saw a mix of "people interested in computer science" and "people interested in programming" -- and as far as I could tell, every one of the CS people was interested in music, while not even one of the programmers was.
U.N. Says 'No,' Climate Hackers Say, 'Yes We Can'
I've found the ratio #points:#comments to be very correlated with story quality. So I'll read only the comments if #comments > #points, because that means an interesting controversial discussion about a boring article.
I see this question asked at least once a week on reddit.
Damn! I guess now isn't exactly the time to ask for a beta invite.
Can't you do this by making your conditional format for a cell dependent on another column, and then use the format for all cells in the column?
Tesla Roadster Sport packs a little more punch for a lot more coin
Does R Commander fit your needs?

http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/
Aggregate what? Quality reporting is difficult and expensive.
The problem I see with claiming that the model is wrong is that, well... the model isn't wrong. Sure, maybe one day our economic policies will shift away from capitalism, but we are a capitalistic nation (though with some unfortunate socialistic leanings IMHO). The reason why economists can apply practically the same methods to the 21st century as they did the 20th is that there is no real difference in the fundamentals of the economy have not changed. We still operate in a capitalistic society where supply and demand create (relatively) efficient generation of wealth. Sure, you can buy things on eBay and the like, and transactions on the stock market are now digital, but the market still fundamentally behaves in the same way.
Coming up with new game ideas is the holy grail of game design, but a game designer's day to day work is creating and refining game content, often working with programmers to tweak the implementation.

For instance, take Super Mario Bros.: the developer would write the graphics rendering code, physics, make a level editor, etc, but it's the game designers who decided beforehand what the concepts would be, and work afterward to create and playtest the levels themselves until the game is fun.

For a more modern example, in World of Warcraft, developers push all the polygons and worry about collision detection and timing of spell effects, while game designers say "the fireball spell should do n damage at x range, and the Whatzisname questline should have such-and-such a set of rewards; here's the dialogue script."

If you prefer, you can think of developers as providing the toolkit, and designers as building the game with it, but in a much more iterative process.
Hi Ross, little things add up, and they are easy to fix in higher level languages (with macros). I consider programming to be a process of building abstractions, and I think the best high-level abstractions are concise.

I like to quote Peter Norvig on the subject of interpreted languages. But in his quote, he uses "interactive." Maybe that's a better word:

"Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the normal, interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as you hit a key, or "batch" mode, in which you only hear the notes after you finish a whole song? Clearly, interactive mode makes learning easier for the piano, and also for programming. Insist on a language with an interactive mode and use it." - Peter Norvig, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

I've seen Objective-J and generally have good feelings about Javascript. But it's not particularly strong on one other criteria that I like to apply, which is that it should be easy to mix code written at different language levels.
I too check the comments on suspiciously titled stories. I think it would be a worthy experiment to try to label linkbait.

I find I often check the comments for stories first if I think the article might be long (from a magazine site like The Economist), if I can't figure out what it is about from the title, or if a title is designed to be a hook -- i.e. it leaves out information intentionally to make you curious.
Source Control HOWTO by Eric Sink
The Coming Decline of RSS and Atom
* Have a linux/osx box that will be your server. Have ssh and git installed and configured.

* Configure all client laptops with passwordless ssh logins to the server (i.e. using certificates) and install git on them.

* Create a bare git repo on the server. I have a repo for each user.

* Have a ~/backup.sh script (better call it backup.command on macs) each of your client laptops that looks something like this (this one is for OSX):

http://pastie.org/358427

Then create a cron job that runs this file as often as you want. It's actually pretty efficient, in my case runs in about 3 seconds if there are no significant changes.

My laptops run it every 20 minutes and my home directory (and music, photos and other stuff) is 100% identical on all computers I work on.

The server, in turn, can be configured to encrypt and push your stuff at night over to your slicehost account or something, when you're not using your connection and this the speed isn't much of an issue.
Government debt is typically paid back at some point. What makes you think it won't be this time?
Good point, I meant that the introductory tut was only 4 pages. THanks for correcting me!
Huh, in that case it is better to learn to lie very well, then tell them after the successful test what you lied about. That seems like a different kind of training.
Can you speak from experience?
Why Table Tennis is a Great Hacker Sport
Wonders of Probability
Separation of data, formulas, and graphs (a la MVC). It shouldn't be a mystery to me whether a number is data I've entered, or a result of a computation.

It should also have a real solver, so I don't have to work out formulas on paper first. If I can type in some equations (legibly) and it's possible to derive the data I want from the data and formulas I've given, then just do it.

(I understand Lotus Improv got this right. In fact, from what I've read about it, Lotus Improv got many things right. A modern clone of Improv would be cool.)

Also, it should know units. If my search engine can do unit conversions on the fly, my spreadsheet ought to be able to.

Better graphing. I'm not sure exactly what I want, but every time I try to make a graph in a spreadsheet, I end up with something that doesn't look at all like I wanted.

N.B., I've basically given up on spreadsheets. For lists, I use an outliner. For simple math, I use a HLL like Ruby or Lisp or Octave. I suspect if there was an OmniOutliner for Windows, Excel would die overnight.
It is already possible in Excel, but it is very poorly documented.

I have a few sheets that I use which pull from a non-ODBC URL using http. It populates a range of cells with new data automatically each time the spreadsheet is opened. (on a Mac too).
The effectiveness of the lie detector seems like another version of the belief that God can see your every thought and will judge you accordingly. It is something that is more effective in producing confessions the more people suspect it might be true.
As in woot.com?
There is an equation tool in Excel for this purpose.
I tend to start with 'Howdy'. That is also how I usually answer the phone (Howdy, this is James...). Some times I insert the persons name afterwards, or some times I skip the Howdy and just put their name in. It just depends on who I am contacting and why.
Okay! That makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot for explaining.

Are you in that job right now, to my parent post? What sorts of things have you learned from it? What trends do you see developing within the industry?
When Excel asks if you want to use the list builder, you do. That is exactly what it does.

With the list builder you are always given an extra row at the bottom to continue adding to the list. Any formulas below the list builder will be pushed down and expanded.

The list builder also turns on Auto Filters for the list as well.
If you don't have an invite, you can still sign up, you just have to wait a bit. See: http://heroku.com/beta
Well, it's always easier to learn a second instrument if you have a firm grasp on basic music theory.
I hated playing the piano, but in retrospect, it's really helped me pick up the bass faster/better.
Interview with Alan Kay and Danny Hillis
Not final: http://twitter.com/jeresig/status/1112313724
Set the Excel Spreadsheet to pull from a remote data source using ODBC.

That gives the added security of allowing people to play with the data without changing the data in the database.
This is a GREAT article. I love the author's "axiomatic" approach to programming -- these aren't your standard programming tips.
Your comment looks like an observation, but it includes an implicit interpretation of the events. It is a clever technique, but harmful to the pursuit of transparent discussion.
sponsored missions.

if people complete missions to rack up points to become top users, offer an advertising program that companies can tie higher point missions into their product somehow.
It is also available as a free download for developers to try it out and learn / test.

I have used SQL Reporting Services as well as Business Objects tools and I am pretty impressed with the latest releases from MS.
One thing that stuck out was the consensus among all parts of the source that Motif sucks :-) I was also surprised by the number of comments along the lines of "This is a Hack for shipping 3.0beta4!!" that were never taken out later. I suppose this kind of cruft accrues in all really big projects.

Some funny bits excerpted:

ns/lib/libmime/mimehdrs.c # define terry_has_lost_his_mind_and_also_macs_suck 0

ns/cmd/macfe/central/medithyper.cp PissOnThisDocument(fHContext);

ns/cmd/xfe/dialogs.c #ifdef Motif_doesnt_suck

cmd/xfe/editordialogs.c: char* fuck;

nspr/src/sco_license.c: SCO has this whacked-out licensing library that's more trouble than

That last line was prescient :-)
Usually I have a quick scan of the article, read the comments, then return to the article if it sounds worth reading.
use a versioned filesystem?

openvms to the rescue!
like an OLAP viewer?
Article summary: Many people who got laid off, went to start successful companies.
Never used heroku, save for creating an account and clicking around. You mention Git integration - do you know if it is compatible with a Pushr setup? (http://www.restafari.org/pushr-or-the-application-will-deplo...)

For us, we just commit & push to a deploy branch and that script does the rest for getting it live.

Oh and I've got another question - does heroku allow terminal access for the live instance(s). More specifically, I like having instant access to the mysql db on the live server.. for situations that I need to fix something asap.
Some "smart" bombs require GPS, but not all. It's my understanding that certainly the US military (and thus one imagines the IDF) possesses the ability to interfere with the C/A code but not the P(Y)-code. This being the case it would be next to useless for Hamas to attempt to jam GPS (unless Israeli troops were carrying civilian GPS units for personal use), but advantageous for the IDF.
I think so. But I don't think the published spreadsheet can be edited online.
Gnumeric is programmable in Python
http://www.boost.org

The next time you find yourself saying "I wish C++ let me do X" or "I wish the STL had a library for Y" take a moment to search through Boost. You might find something that fits your needs.

I've read a lot of hate for Boost. I personally make a point to use it everytime it provides functionality I need. The libraries often have a learning curve - sometimes a significant one. But they're also usually powerful.
For an STL reference, I find the one pointed to by bayareaguy (http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/) easier to browse.
Absolutely, I am.
Hyper-V != Virtual Server. They're both virtualization products made by Microsoft, but the underlying technology is vastly different. Incidently, you can use the version of Hyper-V that comes with Windows Server 2008 R2 beta (i.e. Windows 7 server beta) to run Windows 7 client as a virtual machine.
I see the value in being "interactive", but it isn't enough to rule out any other factor in choosing a language.
The father of a friend of mine from college sells software that newspapers use to do their layouts as well as the printers that make the papers. His customers include the very large newspapers across the US as well as the smaller local papers.

My friend told me in 1999/2000 that his father had declining sales. More and more papers were either not buying the next version, putting off purchasing decisions, or simply going out of business or consolidating.

So the 1999-2000 time frame is obviously not pre-internet. But I think there are other factors besides people reading the newspaper on the internet instead of buying a print version.

I canceled my subscription because the delivery person couldn't get it to my front door. Sometimes the paper landed on the roof of my house. Sometimes he put it in the snow in front of my house. Other times it simply got rained on.

I also think the custom of reading the daily paper is going away. People aren't just reading the paper online instead of in print. They are watching the 6pm news instead of reading the print paper. Maybe even more people aren't doing that.
I personally enjoy browsing google code for "here be dragons"

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Here...
The Author said "So Obama will spend upwards of a trillion dollars of stimulus in a combination of tax cuts, building roads, bridges, and hopefully public transportation. And it can't hurt and maybe it will help." I can think of plenty of ways this could hurt.

Obama could create new entitlements that burden America for generations. The money could be used to prop up failing businesses, creating a situation where success is determined by who has the best lobbyists.

Not every loan is a bad idea, but plenty of them are. There is no guarantee the effect of this loan will be positive.
Well, if you show enough of the comments to be useful, then the front page will be really long and cluttered. If you only show the first 100ish chars like gmail does, then it probably won't be enough to be useful, since HN comments tend to be long and well written.

So I guess I'm trying to say I like it the way it is. It would take just as long to read mouseover/preview text as it does to open the comments in a new tab and scan them.
Be careful with this. You'll start out reading the comments first. Then you'll begin ignoring the links entirely and we end up at <other news site>.
I'm about half and half. I look for the submitter, if they usually submit good stuff, or if I recognize the source I'll usually click straight to the article. Otherwise I just read the comments.
I just read the new comments page.
I'm arguing that a paper seatbelt is a deception. Metaphorically, if you know a car doesn't have a seatbelt you'll drive more cautiously, or possibly have a seatbelt installed that you know works. In other words, you'll use your cognitive faculties to assess the risk and then manage that risk.

What we should not do is idealize the paper seatbelt or pretend that it works when it does not, or pretend that the design of that paper seatbelt hasn't been heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists, corrupt politicians, etc.
Though foos is the official sport of Yahoo, I've always preferred the ping pong tables.
Surprise Your Friend with Geneva Escort Girls
Geneva escort agency and models are mainly used and hired for having a relaxed evening. They are hired depending on the occasion in which the customer likes to be with an escort. For instance, if the customer just wishes to have a date and a romantic evening, he prefers to hire a young girl who would look cute and charming. Where as, if the customer wishes to take an escort for an official business meeting then he would prefer to hire sophisticated girl with a strong personality and educational