skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was wondering what happened slinkset. It's been quiet on their features/help sets and usually they are very responsive and pander to requests with lightning speed. I was worried that they were packing it in. It's a relief to know that they were just knocking this out. congratz guys, looks great. categories coming 09? :)
This is a pretty killer feature. I utilize an Amazon wish list for my family but sometimes what I want simply isn't sold there. Instead of making my own custom list I'd love to use Amazon for it all.
Networking, maintenance work on prior jobs, and extensions to OSS.

I did well by making and contributing to some pretty common Rails plugins in the Rails 0.10-1.x days, and blogging a bit. Some small tech-centric businesses wanted some Rails expertise, were using the plugins, and contacted me.
Its a TinyMCE plugin that talks to a web service I wrote. It does require a proxy script on the server side. My wordpress plugin comes with one of those. Getting ready to go beta with the whole thing soon.
agreed. Flipping burgers is a net gain for the economy, moving icons around in the control panel for no reason and confusing people is a net loss :-)
A nip here, a tuck there and Digg keeps improving. Now if only they could tackle the unacceptable signal/noise ratio and I might return to spend some of my social news time.
This is all very well. However, an argument can be based on sound principles and be can be totally supportable, and yet due to limited speaking or writing abilities of the adherent, not be convincing. Of course the other is also true, a good writer or speaker can successfully convince a reader or listener of a totally false premise.

I see several skills necessary to successfully and accurately lay out a position. They are:

1. Ability to write or speak
2. Depth of knowledge about the subject
3. Ability to listen to or read material and understand it to a depth beyond the superficial.
4. Ability to analyse--this implies an IQ at least as high as the speaker or writer.
5, Access to additional material pertinent to the subject
6. A world view relatively free from preconceived notions of reality.

I am reminded that when I have arguments about politics, conservative versis liberal; ie which is a better philosophy--the question has to be asked, compared to what, for what purpose, etc. The argument to me can have no resolution.
This is probably the most creative use of youtube ever
When it's not yet available...like on the iPhone.
Worm infects millions of computers worldwide
_very_early mornings have worked for me too on all critical work. One has to experience the 4 am bliss to appreciate it.

When I have company I do end up working late night.
Pick PHP if you want to use Wordpress, phpBB, Drupal, and a wealth of other great open-source web apps.

P.S. Final post; great community here!
What ads have you clicked? I get absolutely nothing but diet ads, 3-4 ads for different diets per page. My female friends report the same. My single male friends get nothing but dating site ads.
It would be nice if these articles (especially in net-savvy Wired) included computability and physical access arguments defining the current limits of practical internet surveillance, scoping a bit the unbounded oh-my-god-they're-reading-everything. Distributed growth beats centralized (observer) growth, no matter how many cooperative agents (AT&T, etc). i.e. what's the current sampling ceiling?
What kinds of meetups did you go to? How did you let people know you're available?
Agree on the first. The second would be easy to get around (subsidiaries).
Fair enough. I just wanted to see if there were features that are common of forums that I did not recall. I've also added the ability of tagging and some different methods of posting topics other than the standard forum discussion way such as questions that might result in a single answer or a voting type of discussion. I just made the forum public a few days ago so yes there are not many members, but hopefully that will change soon.
It's fifteen years old now. That's probably older than some of the people who post to this board. I'd have more sympathy for the 'spoiler' effect if the end wasn't also as obvious as a nail in the foot, even though its obviousness doesn't detract from the strength of the story.
Transfer Jet: 375 Mb/s wireless connection
Nice and thorough. I only have two qualms:

1. Reading through the Matz book on Ruby (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596516178/index.html), there's a very good explanation as to why Ruby/Python/Perl are "scripting" languages as opposed to "programming" languages: no main! That is, whichever file is fed to the interpreter is run (with some exceptions) in order. So these are, and probably always will be, scripting languages.

2. The author vastly underestimates the importance of Javascript...
In fairness, why not just learn Perl? Then go back to PHP if it fits the problem space...
Typically either late at night or very early in the morning.

Few distractions/noise, plus you can't make noise yourself so you end up banging away at the keyboard for a while.
Link to video: http://crackle.com/c/Blogs_and_Podcasts/Transfer_Jet_technol...

According to the video it can achieve tranfer speeds up to 560 MB/s.
Creating a video can require significantly more effort than you'd think and the results will probably appear amateurish, even if you've a ridiculous amount of time and budget to call upon (see Vayner).

Your best option would be to focus on how you present yourself in writing (watch that spelling!) and (if you have cash to spend) purchase some appropriate clothing you feel good in instead.
I work for a government agency, and we have to deal with these from time to time.

As to Niels, I wish I was sarcastic, but I wasn't making any of it up. They are 'considered' munitions, and are treated as such, but really, it's just a matter of what happens if the phone got into the wrong hands. They do have a remote kill feature, but that incurs delay, and isn't foolproof.

As for the proprietary tapes, that may be true at some agencies, but I've only seen Travan tapes in use in practice.
I've gotten all of my clients, for both writing (freelance blogging and copywriting) as well as programming, from job boards. If you have some previous work that was outstanding, you can often jump to the top of those boards.

-M
An actual inbox requires many clicks to clear all unreads, assuming you actually read them. What I'm proposing clears all unreads with one click.

Alternatively, just have an asterisk to indicate that there are new submissions you haven't checked out yet:

new* | threads | comments | leaders | jobs | submit

That's probably the most minimalist incentive you can give to increase New pageviews, and fairly easy to implement. (Edit: updated the original post with this suggestion.)
Mostly just this: http://melbourne.twitterusergroup.com/ though I imagine attending things like StartupCamps would also be beneficial.

Letting people know is as simple as putting it in your introduction when you first meet. "So what do you do again?" "I'm a freelance web developer actually, at the moment I'm working on X but I do a lot of different stuff including Y and Z." There's no need to go overboard on 'selling yourself', if people like you and know what you do that's enough.
The circadian cycle that regulates sleep (amongst other things) has a 25-ish hour period for most people, in the absence of natural time signaling stimuli (i.e. sunlight and noise). In natural conditions, sunlight in the morning readjusts your body clock in roughly +/-15m increments.

Recent research points to a faster way to adjust your body clock:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199394
The only thing that comes close to giving MS a run for its money is, surprisingly, Steam. I've been playing some Left 4 Dead lately, and the social features in that game are very compelling, and it stretches over to other Valve games like Team Fortress 2, and even some third-party titles.

Too bad PC gaming is a bit of a dying industry :(
Can we customize the ranking algorithm? Pretty please?
I recently had been contacted by a client thru Philweavers - try to register there too. Charging clients is a little bit tricky. You can charge per projec or per hour. I prefer hourly rates because there is less pressure - you don't get paid unless you work.

I am assuming that you have a steady dayjob. So charge you're client to what _you_ think is worth your extra/rest time. And don't overdo this :P spend some time for yourself -- hack a pet project or learn something new :P Once you get into it, it's hard to back out :(
"I would like a special curry box lunch, fried rice, and large bomb."

Innocent indeed.
I beat rubywarrior
God no, they are the slimiest bunch of scammers: http://mssv.net/wiki/index.php/Givewell

1) A so-called "charity" engages in shady, dishonest marketing online

2) It's soaking up a huge amount of money as salary, while not doing anything itself,
rather it's trying to act as a "charity middle man"

3) They promote transparency and accountability in philanthropy without
bothering to practice what they preach.

4) Hedge fund wankers continuing to act in a greed-is-good manner despite entering
a philanthropic endeavor, and weakening trust in non-profits indirectly (by being
shady themselves) and directly (by bashing other charities anonymously in order to
promote themselves).
Well said. I think a real debate needs to take place about gathering all forms of intelligence by "macro-polling." A traffic cop polls each car with a radar gun looking for speeders. A cop walking the beat polls pedestrians for suspicious behavior. Are my civil rights being violated simply b/c a cop looks at me in the street? Should cops simply stay at the station and wait to be called?

I think a lot of this meta-data network analysis is analogous to the traffic and beat cops. I'd be interested to whether or not people think that's true...
One of the big problems has been figuring out how to monetize it. The advertising isn't working (probably too much of that).

And the advertising networks don't pay reliably. I know the domains are getting clicked and sold, but there isn't always a commission at the end of the rainbow.

I have sold a few custom lists -- but I'm curious what other monetization ideas there might be...
Heterogeneous vs. Homogeneous System Architectures
Its an interesting idea. I'm working with GAE but before I started I had to choose what platform I wanted to use. It seems like if I needed S3 it would have been best to go 100% amazon.

I don't want to discourage you at all. Make a demo and let people see how it can be used. Maybe I'm just unique and not the target user
What's Microsoft's Next Move In Netbook Game?
Yeah, sorry if we were a bit quiet on the home front. We've tried to do a good job of keeping up on the help requests though. As for features, we've been knocking some out here and there, but as you can see from the Virgin America site...categories are alive and kicking. Look for them to be released to the public real soon.
I prefer:

<FRAMESET cols="66%, 34%">

<FRAME src="http://news.ycombinator.com/">

<FRAME src="http://news.ycombinator.com/newest">

</FRAMESET>

Makes it easier to read because Y content is usually skinny and most new screens are wide. :)

edit: but I'm splitting hairs...
Is it ok now to say that on 9/11 the WTC were demolish, not collapsed?
With W gone it is ok now to discuss 9/11 and all the weird stuff that happen on that day?
I don't know PHP, so didn't comment on it. Would it get its own category, or fit into one of the ones I gave?
Apple’s App Store: 15,000 apps. Google’s Android Marketplace: 800 apps
"The worm has reignited a debate inside the computer security community over the possibility of eradicating the program before it is used by sending out instructions to the botnet that provide users with an alert that their machines have been infected."

I'd personally rather see that happen than see the botnet gain in strength, but what's your assessment of the technical risks of doing that?
Interesting way to define "scripting" languages.

I didn't mean to underestimate JavaScript, which is why I gave it its own section. Perhaps I was too brief? Implication that its only useful in the browser?
I worked for two large companies in a consulting/contracting role for about eight years and built a reputation for good work and network of contacts from there. I'm still trying to expand out into some other markets to get a little diversification, so I've been trying a variety of routes to make that happen- mainly looking for problems that I could solve and building some prototypes that could be adapted to their needs. We have about 25 people on my team now though, so I have the coverage to do that kind of stuff.
I hate the whole argument of the "problem" of hanging/dangling pointers as reason for GC. Is GC only for covering up your n00b mistakes? GC will never be a reasonable management scheme for realtime or limited memory systems, where programmer responsibility and predictable behavior is required.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_is_Nothing_(video_r%...
Do they really expect me to create a username and login to their site just so I can click a link? And its for a strategy-business site? Really?
100% word of mouth / referrals. When I was just getting started, I just asked my clients if they knew anyone that I might be of service to. They were happy enough with my work that just asking that question a few times kept me busy for years. Try it - it might surprise you!
An Analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, written in 2006
I code when and only when I've completed reading every article on Hacker News.
Turning blogs into newspapers is the new counterintuitive thing
If I could downvote you 125 points, I would. Seriously, come on, how can you start a business if you don't listen to logic and evidence?
Encouraging Web Interaction for University Students
I get a lot of ads for Arrested Development shirts, The Wire boxed sets, and a lot of James Joyce-related stuff. Lebowski things pop up a lot too.
As someone who lives in New York City, I, personally, would like to never be reminded of it ever again -- especially discussions revolving around pointless speculation and paranoid conspiracy theories.

But, more to the point, I don't think such discussions have any place in this forum.
I get the "what language should I learn" question pretty often. I think I'll point the asker to this article. Thanks for a very broad and easy-to-digest overview.
This kind of thing is really difficult to do in Ruby. (I'm guessing you're looking for something similar to the autocomplete lists you've used in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or another IDE?)

Because classes can have new methods added at runtime, individual objects can have methods added or removed at runtime, and so on and so forth, there's no easy way to reflect and grab that information while you're typing.

Having said that, try the following in irb or script/console (not sure how to do that on Heroku)

>> object.methods.sort

>> object.methods.sort.grep /something/

(where /something/ is a regexp representing the name or part of a name of what you're looking for).

Hope that helps!
Wasn't suggesting to you'd actually write a product schedule priced relative to beer (or anything else), but only that there are some who have difficulty connecting a figure with value delivered. This is more common than you'd think.

You've led to another interesting point however, being that $10 per month is rarely a price point at which any but the smallest of clients would consider you an important vendor. Depending on your personal definition of Serious Business Clients (TM), you will likely encounter the somewhat complementary problem of such clients failing to connect value delivered with such a low price point (even at $199).
When I write something about something, I'm always tempted to submit it on HN. Is it a bad idea?

Please do. I would much rather read what you have to say and provide some advice than read yet another frikkin' article on how Obama's new toilet is now Internet-capable and just cleared for top-secret access by the NSA.

Ask-HN posts are often some of best threads on this site:
http://top.searchyc.com/commented
Nice, a modern "choose your own adventure"
Ask HN: Feedback on an idea for a service
So this is an idea that's been kicking around in my head a while. I've sought feedback on it before, and had two different responses - an iPhone app dev said it sounded quite useful, while someone whose opinion I respect immensely was skeptical.

The idea is to create a "location wiki" - an attempt to describe every location with as much metadata as possible. This overlaps with what Chris Brogan wants Brightkite to become, "the annotated world", here http://www.chrisbrogan.com/if-i-owned-brightkite/ and I think an opportunity does exist to create this "annotated world" resource (though I don't think Brightkite is it).

This could have a couple of different interfaces: a website for users to visit, and an extensive API for developers.

The website would let users look up a location and see a description, photos, related locations, websites, whatever. For example looking up a train station would show you the line that station is part of, the suburb it's in, nearby businesses, etc., but the entry would also contain lower-level data about what type of place this is (eg. public transport), and could pull in items from other services that are geotagged.

But the main benefit I'm envisioning is having a service like this with a reasonably complete dataset ready to be plugged into third-party apps. As far as I'm aware, iPhone apps like nrme cobble together business listings and whatnot from a few different 3rd-party resources, but with this service, they could plug it in as their location-contextual backend and immediately have that data and functionality available. I am aware Google Maps also contains a lot of extra data about locations these days (business listings, photos, etc) but it's by no means comprehensive, nor does it aim to be I think.

There would be a few different ways to monetise, but I imagine selling ownership of a business' wiki entry would be the easiest - a business could buy their entry and restrict editing, publish updates, link to their website, whatever.

The main criticisms I've had so far are:

* Nobody needs it - I disagree, I think it's something that will only become more relevant as mobile/location-contextual internet use increases

* Not feasible, too large in scope - I agree in that I do think getting a reasonable amount of data would be the hardest task. But you have to start somewhere...

Would love to hear your feedback. If it's a stupid idea then please be gentle :) If not, who wants to start working on it with me?
The final line of this overreaching and hand-wavy article had a keen observation:

"as the ability to modify is squeezed from classic ownership models (think of those silly shrink-wrap warranties), ownership is degraded."

Indeed, why would I want to buy a DVD for $20 when every single time it boots there is a minute of fluff footage that you are forced to watch? This is worth paying for?

If the traditional media (book, audio, film) companies don't wake up soon, then people are going to decide that the actual VALUE of all information is zero, even though it is clearly above zero.
What are the effects of GC on hard real-time systems (NASA rovers, power plants)?
This story has been all over the tech web + CNN, etc.
But you pick up the one issue that I find most interesting to debate: what about unauthorized pre-emptive strikes against the worm.
Michael Argast at Sophos says that such intervention "can cause" worse problems than the worm.
Yes. If written poorly. And tested insufficiently.
Maybe a legal change is needed: to allow certain organizations to have government clearance to intervene ONCE sufficiently tested.
As for the occasional victims for whom there is some unpleasant side-effect to the de-worming: maybe that's the price of practicing "unsafe sex" ?
In some territories it might be appropriate to impound cars whose owners leave keys in ignition (as an "attractive nuisance").
Thoughts?
I appreciate the feedback. I knew it wouldn't be trivial if it hadn't been implemented but you are exactly right that I was looking for something similar to the list an IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse used to give me of available methods when I programmed in java.

Anyways thanks for the response and I guess I will have to truly learn ruby.

First Note on Rails: has_and_belongs_to_many is painfully long to type.
My god. This is so wrong, it warms my heart to see someone even had the idea to do something so absurd, and then actually carried it out.
Me too! We must have similar profiles.
Which, of course, helps Amazon figure out what it doesn't sell, but should. I'd say it's a brilliant idea, but I can't help thinking, what took them so long?
Google shuts down Austin office, just months after splashy opening
If you are on twitter (or use RSS), http://twitter.com/newsycombinator alerts you of the top 5 new stories each hour ("the algorithm is just the top 5 items from the RSS feed every hour" - http://twitter.com/riklomas/status/1093938010)
Does your Representative have an RSS Feed?
Most ideas take a different shape as they are gradually implemented. So your concept may actually morph into a different application/platform as you start working on it. I'd say start working on a prototype of what you have in mind, and then plan the course of direction.
Nuclear Apocalypse and the Letter of Last Resort
The no-one-noticing-good-submissions is seemingly a huge problem here and I think working on fixing that will make HN much better. I emailed PG a few months ago with some ideas I had about how to quantitatively measure submission and discussion quality, but he did not respond. I'll forgive him though, he's been making babies and startups :)
I think what he meant was that all of those overseas users suck up bandwidth for Facebook, costing them money, while returning very little. It's true. It's why, for example, apps on MySpace get much higher eCPM on offer pages.

Facebook is far more globally skewed than MySpace according to just about all of the stat estimates.
wikipedia says 560 Mb/s max, 375 Mb/s effective.

Who is getting their bits and bytes mixed up?
Actually, straw bales burn very poorly. When locked away behind a layer of stucco, even more poorly.

Ditto for mildew.

The earthquake resistance, pest resistance, and insulating qualities of straw bale construction are mind-blowing.
Apple's app store supports charging for applications. Google's does not. Given that the work involved in developing an app for either platform is roughly comparable, it's not at all surprising that there would be more offerings for the iPhone/iTouch ecosystem.
Naive or principled? Who knows in this case. Sad reality is that in many parts of the world you've got to factor bribes into your financials.
Ask HN: Does Depakote fuck you up?
I have been taking Depakote and recently found out it caused brain damage. Is this true?

I know it's not really HN, but this is the best forum I know...is mechanical_fish out there?
Yah, I just get Kaplan and Blackberry Ads. The usual I'm sure. My lack of profile information probably confuses their algorithms.
i think that all 99% of the people here could tell you, you could find in a quick google search.

all drugs have side effects. if you're worried about it, talk to the person who prescribed it to you, imo.