skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought it was confusing how the quiz controls changed after I answered the first question.

You should make that consistent.

Otherwise nice work.
Wow, I really like this site. Some of the graphics leave a little to be desired (the logo and the greater than sign on the "see your results" page). But, I really liked the flow and interaction. It did take me a second though to figure out what was going on when I started the quiz, because the buttons jumped from the right of the image to the left and were replaced with a bunch of text on the right. I thought I had been taken away from the quiz and was a bit confused.

Very sweet though. I'm going to pass it on definitely.
Debugging IE6
Most lifehack articles are written by people of modest accomplishments, and, personally, I find it difficult to take them seriously. Doctorow has accomplished quite a lot - certainly, far more than most of the productivity "gurus" - and I think it's much more interesting to hear what he thinks is important.
I read it was dead. http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2008/02/the_ruby_communi...
guitar effects pedal
Because snarking on Facebook is fun!

My belief is that with straight up direct ad sales and limited targeting ads, MySpace cleared $1B this year. That's the potential upper limit of how much Facebook can make with just straight up ad sales.

But having a much more complete understanding of relationships, Facebook wants to find something more effective and profitable than AdSense. That's what Mark Zuckerberg really pitched to everyone that has invested into Facebook: his team's ability to reinvent online advertising.

The products they have so far -- Beacon, Social Ads -- are kind of lame but Facebook Connect is getting pretty big and they have quite a lot of money and time to work on it.

But all this doesn't matter. Facebook isn't profitable! And somehow this affects hackers around the world.
Pretty great, it was spot on with me.
WIN 9,0,115,0

according to http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn...
*Don't shell out for the $100 version that lets you push apps to your iPhone until you have AT LEAST the rough draft of your app completed and running on the simulator. There's nothing worse then spending $100 on something and then never using it because you've lost interest.

Disagree, without a developer provisioning certificate you can't test the app on a real phone. There are a few inconsistencies between the Simulator and the real device, you need to test early.

re: the red tape. This is only a problem if you charge for the app. Free apps are dead simple, and Apple has been super responsive in approving our app. Only took them 3 business days.
OPhone: Google Android Heads to China
The application is just as much (actually, probably more) about the interior design than the engineering :)
They took a $150 million loss in 2007, and then made projections for 100% growth (and hired 100% more staff) for 08, which we now know is a recession year.

That means they are still losing money. It doesn't matter if they have $1B in revenue, if it costs them $1.1B to operate, things are not sustainable.
Now it's down to better marketing...
A device that twitpics from my dog's collar every X minutes. I'd like to take a glance at what my dog's day is filled with. He seems very busy. This may be more fun with a cat though. Especially one that goes outside (though you'd need an EVDO connection, probably).
Now that you mention it, the logo is eerily similar. It's just rotated 90 degrees with a "g" slapped on top.
I think the mini-revolution Palm's pulled off isn't being understood. They've implemented a full SDK in HTML/CSS/JS. Unlike the helpless widgets of the apple-side, Palm's presenting their entire API as a set of extensions to a pretty forward-looking HTML stack.

From what I've seen:

- Graphics: HTML5 canvas. No word yet on if it's got the 3D support that's been planned for that canvas. But 2D access for graphics is pretty certain.

- Other than that, HTML5 local storage for your app data. They even have javascript access to old palm .pdb files.

- Javascript access to the contacts, calendar, phone, etc. APIs

- The app is stored locally, and can run without network access.

- As for networking/ssl... it's a web app written in HTML/AJAX, think about it :-)
The endless GIL debate: why not remove thread support instead? http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-December/08...
Yeah, that's exactly what was happening. It's working now.
I've thought of this too, but I can't get around my "moral" (not really, but that's the best description) qualms about this. We already self-select news to reinforce our bias. This idea would just reinforce the bias. Still I'm thinking about doing it. With the caveat that I would occasionally put in a "opposite opinion" article or piece of news.
The blog page gave me a 406 error in internet explorer (ver number 7.0.6001.1800. vista).
also, i'd like to send this site out to a bunch of my friends in the near future, let me know when you guys are ready for a spike in traffic :).
Mahout looks like a really interesting project which has a bunch of Java machine learning algorithm implementations build on top of Hadoop.

http://lucene.apache.org/mahout/

You can glean some good idea from there. Hadoop has a bunch of python libraries if you want to go that route and write it yourself.

" In class we use MATLAB, but I'm slightly hesitant because I want to create some cool web applications."

It shouldn't really mater, just write a Thrift Service and you can call MATLAB from whatever your favorite language is.
hmm. could you try updating it with the latest one?
Ask HN: Does this idea exist and who wants it?
I've been in the middle of working on a start-up for the past 8 months or so, and during that time I've only had one idea that I thought to myself "That idea is worth a lot more money than the one you are working on right now, and it would be easier to engineer."

I wonder if this app already exists. If it doesn't, feel free to run with it if you see the same potential I did.

The app is this - a button to turn a Flickr account into an online store, where people can order prints or pay for the rights to use photos. Everything starts off at a dollar, but it's fully customizable.

Having tinkered with the Flickr API, I don't think this would be hard to engineer. And I think there is an easy revenue model (a cut of sales), a low barrier to entry for users, and a large long tail to make money off of.

So anyways, that's it. I know ideas are worthless, but if you want this one, it's yours.

EDIT: I'm working o n a website for hikers - www.trailbehind.com. Probably less money in it, but it's something I'm passionate about.
The design that inspired the new favicon is a lot better than the one they went with in the end.
Reinforce the bias even more...
Of course this would affect hackers around the world. Anything that Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. affects hackers because so many hackers are employed by these companies. Facebook is the same way, the churn of ideas that goes through each of these companies matters because only through working with other hackers do hackers develop and refine their own ideas. Without these large companies subsidizing hacker side projects we wouldn't get any of the idea building that spins into new companies and growth for our economy.
Agreed. If you can program in anything else, you can pick up enough Python to get started in a day (obviously longer to be really productive).

I've read the O'Reilly Collective Intelligence book, and Python was a nice fit for expressing the ideas in there. That book would definitely get you started with practical uses of ML quickly. I'm not sure any of it is that cutting edge though in the academic sense.

Also just finished On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins last week. Good read. I plan to check out his company's ML ideas when I get some free time - they have free software for download too:

http://www.numenta.com/for-developers/software.php
Things Better Left Off Twitter: Bridezilla Edition
we're working on just that - sharing/comparing/combining your style profile results with others. stay tuned...
I would imagine that by now some sites are relying more on Persistent Identification Elements more than cookies simply because fewer folks know about them, but I've no data.
Somehow, after I click to listen a track, it breaks the "back button".
ff3.05 osx
$11/hr!?
Ideas are not worthless! Good ideas can have potential, but as long as they're untested they're not worth money; they are worthy of pursuit.
Upgraded to WIN 10,0,12,36 - works now.

Edit: about 15 minutes into a set, it stopped playing with no explanation, although the time elapsed changed to NaN:NaN:NaN. Changing tracks or fiddling with the controls couldn't get it going again, but reloading the page did.

Love the concept, and I'm going to keep using it, but it seems to need a bit more QA :p
How Realistic is Obama’s Goal to Double Clean Energy by 2012? « Earth2Tech
Thanks, just updated the PDF with a few things I forgot that I thought were important. At the moment, I think we've got our hands full for the next 3-4 months as we recently announced full-service publishing.

The open-ended model works great for getting things going, but I'm not sure it's viable in the long run. The company needs it's own profits to grow and re-invest in itself. If things go really well, then we'll move to equity stakes in the company and take salary. Two of us still rely on consulting/dev work for primary income.
Actually, what you said is not how it works at all. Most covered calls are in the end, handled by wall street dealers who hedge their deltas with short sales (trust me about this). Retail investors that do covered calls do own the stock, but the net effect is not what you described, it is significantly more complicated. (by the way, the transaction you describe is equivalent to selling a put)

Without closing out the short sales that were done, usually there is always unlimited downside to at least ONE player in this transaction. Why is this intuitive? Abstract for a second. Treat the short sale as a contract, which it is, where you agree that you have to buy some object back in the future in return for a FIXED dollar amount now. If you assume that object (a stock in this case) can go up to an arbitrarily high price, then you always have unlimited downside as long as this contract is in effect.

The point is even if you disallow these artificial short squeezes, you are STILL discouraging "stupid speculative bets", becuase the price can go up naturally (when the thesis of betting against the stock is economically wrong). These are the right times for it to happen, and in fact happens all the time without a volkswagen type squeeze. The point about short squeezes is that someone can make a "smart speculative bet" (which society as a whole needs people to do) but still get blown up for non economic reasons.
Having to work only four hours a week to survive is not the same thing as getting to work only four hours a week for the joy of it. That's what the content of the book is about.
Facebook is more of a kids paradise than hackers paradise.
It isn't as much as both combined. But that is an impressive mountain of cash. Does Steve Jobs give anything to charity, or does he just spend all sledging down his pile of money?
Yea, that is a problem. Silly SWFAddress... Its on the list ;)
With the limit of one burger per customer, the maximum value is (users * whopper_cost), bringing the ceiling to 360 million dollars.

It should actually be a little less, since at some point there will only be 9 users who will have missed out on the flurry of unfriending, like victims of a fattening ponzi scheme.
Zero data loss means if it's committed on the primary, it's committed on the standbys, and if not, not. Oracle has three replication modes, to optimize performance, availability or reliability. You choose what you want according to what you need.
Lovely site.. well done
Behind the scenes of Adsense scheduled maintenance
Widget, maybe. I was specifically talking about something akin to a "native" app. You need hooks to the OS, period, for developers to be happy.

Maybe we need a new word for HTML/JS/CSS apps that have OS-specific hooks. Widget is a horrible word.
Websites with Beautiful Typography
Twitter’s Massive 2008: 752 Percent Growth
using FF 3.0.5 here. I get stuck on the 2nd step of the quiz. The spinner spins forever. However the funny thing is it appears to work fine in IE 8.0.6
The title of the 'forogt password' page is misspelled :)

I love this by the way. I always listen to long trance mixes while progging..
Just a minor nit: if a marginally attached worker looked for work, he would be unemployed.

"Unemployed" == "Not working but looking for work."

"Marginally attached" == "kinda wants a job, but not enough to actually look for one."
In 2009, Microsoft Still Underestimates the Web
If you had implemented a simple string search, and then someone told you that it was usually possible to do a string search without examining all the characters of the string, you'd probably come up with some Boyer-Moore variant. Nevertheless it took decades for people to come up with it. It's one of those cases where the basic idea is the really hard part.

Binary search, among the very basic algorithms, is toward the other extreme. An incorrect version of the algorithm was published something like 20 years before a bug-free version was published.
The fact that Eric Raymond generated both of those ideas refutes your assertion.
i still don't get the instantiation thing why datetime.datetime.now() ?? what's special about saying it twice? noob question but a link somewhere that explains this would be appreciated.
It's an interesting question how much code you can copy under the fair use doctrine. I don't think I've ever seen it tested in court.
"I'm not sure what you'd do to prevent namespace clashes when mixing in different modules or if/how modules share and work on object attribute data"

Read the traits paper: http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Research/Traits/
Sounds good until Yahoo! integrates it into their site...
You think to yourself in the third person?
Self improvements
You're an Apple fanboy :) 5 million devices sold isn't a dominant market position in the mobile market. It's a drop in the ocean. The market is still wide open and Palm may just have invented the best crossover device for casual users (small form factor) and business users (real keyboard).

The app store issue is moot. There isn't a killer must have app that would keep people on the Apple platform. Facebook is the killer app for the under 35 crowd and it's integrated into the Palm. The iPhone could take note.

It won't be better? I find the iPhone annoying, large and clunky. I'd buy a Pre today if it was out.
...by buying your company. ^_^
It's a great idea.

One reason why:

Blogs and news services are pulling more and more photos from Flickr. If you can give the photogs on there an easy way to just let people come and get their pictures, without having to track down permission from them, you'd make life easier for the blog editors.
The "myriad of tax forms" can be very, very nasty if you're not american. Documentation is confusing and I can assure you that the forms are not so understandable, if you're not a native speaker.
The docs on apple site say to apply for a 'TIN' but, as I learnt after some days, a TIN is almost impossible to get outside the US (it seems that you have to send your passport to the IRS by mail).
After a while (and a very useful post on the Internet from an UK guy that managed to get it I discovered that the key is to apply for an EIN. You can apply by phone, they release it to you immediately by phone and, after a while, you will receive a letter from the IRS with the number for your record...
With the EIN you can send your W8-BEN... but this is another, different, story.
Objective-C is easy and the development tools are very good (for an embedded system), the real problem (again, at least if you're not from US) are the US tax forms...
'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years
The first is the datetime module. The second is a class.

It comes down to how you import it. These two bits of code are equivalent:

# Example 1

import datetime; print datetime.datetime.now()

# Example 2

from datetime import datetime; print datetime.now()

I generally prefer "import FOO" over "from FOO import BAR", which is why you see example 1 used in the Django Book.
I bet most users wouldn't leave facebook for $12. Interestingly I doubt most would pay $12 for the service, either.
Reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

"Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd."
Wonderful! I always dreamed of programming phones in HTML/CSS/JS. This is a great step forward from C/C++/ObjC. Joking, of course... but this seems to me the way for trivial apps, given the constraint in a phone-sized OS.
I hope to be wrong. Palm has been my first (useful) PDA...
On the contrary, spreadsheets are a cool model of computation. They're live - you can update the value of any variable (cell) and all the other references update automatically. It's a dataflow model.

See, for example, the Cells project at http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/
Wow, really? What else made/makes up the PC intonation?
Spreadsheet-style Programming with Lisp
> cleared $1B this year

I doubt that, cleared tends to means profit, not revenue, how much did they actually make after all the expenses were paid?
Python was designed with readability as a goal. That was the reason for significant white space rather than {}. On some European keyboards the braces had to be typed as triples. I don't find Java particularly readable even though I code in it every day.

a.equals(b) vs a == b

The antithesis of readability is APL, which is nothing but line noise. When it came out, you had to get a special printhead just to type it. You could make some unbelievable one-liners though.
Um, you seem to have missed a rather key part of his story. Sure, he works more than four hours a week--that's not some amazing insight, it's plainly obvious. The thing you seem to have missed is that he only spends a negligible amount of time maintaining his income from the supplement company which was founded long before the book was even written. That was his primary income before the book and may very well still be today.

I'm not sure how you missed it. That he was able to establish an almost entirely automated source of income is pretty central to the book. Unless you'd like to supply some evidence that he didn't do that, you've done a better job of painting yourself as a liar than him.
Do you have data to back that up?
I assume you meant "second" person. Surely everyone does this. "You don't really want X." "Dammit, Randall, that was a stupid idea."

You don't do this?
"We will pay each developer $1500- $2200 for working 200 hours per month. That is 7.50 US dollars to 11 US dollars per hour.

...

However, most applicants who apply for this job don't meet our standards. Therefore we reject them. In this regard we are not unique; we are normal.

...

We have found that most candidates who apply for jobs on GetAFreelancer are either not really serious (perhaps they are upset with their boss and 'Internet dreaming' about a better job somewhere "out there") or or not sufficiently talented (such as, the vast majority of PHP coders)."

hint: i could get a data entry position with benefits and a higher hourly rate than i would with this position. you're having problems finding quality candidates because you're offering 4 or so times lower pay than what your average quality freelancer asks. if you want quality developers, pay a competitive, quality wage.
So you made a stupid claim and were wrong and you're trying to change the subject by making an even dumber claim?

Why?
I think the app store sucks and my developer enthusiasm has been blown away by iFarts...
What he writes sounds good actually. I hope very much that he is right, because I couldn't yet bring myself to buy an iPhone, but there are no real alternatives yet, either.
Ah, yes.... The collectivists controlled the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives and used their power to regulate the credit derivatives market out of existence. How much better things would have been if the Chairman of the Federal Reserve had heard of Objectivism!

Even the off-hand pop culture references are crapulous: "A Confederacy of Dunces" surely counts as a "classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie", and it is a lot funnier than anything Ayn Rand ever wrote.
Researchers applying P2P to traffic control
> readers rated "Atlas" as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.
yes - account creation lets you save rooms that you've created (we have people who have spent hours putting together different room combinations) but you're right about the high hurdle and we'll shortly be releasing a version that you can use all the way through without signing up.
The datetime module was also written before the Python style conventions were created.

If the datetime module was written today, it would make a bit more sense looking like this:

import datetime

datetime.DateTime.now()
I find it a little unsettling that I agree both with you and with the parent post...
Better if default price is a quarter rather than a dollar.
Wolfire Games: Are games art?
This is a good idea. Last month I was creating a simple website and I needed a stock photo. I went to Flickr and looked for a few minutes because I knew something would be available there. Had I found one I would definitely pay for it.
A good and easy thing to A/B test.
Of the many pieces of evidence that Microsoft doesn't get the web, the fact that they suffer under download spikes is one of the least persuasive. For example: they think that buying Yahoo, the slowly sinking grandaddy of the web, is somehow going to help them beat Google, even though Google has been wiping the floor with Yahoo for near-on a decade now.
Basically, what it comes down to is Python's explicit over implicit policy. First, unlike PHP, not everything in the Python language is automatically included in every file. You explicitly import things. datetime is a module in the standard Python library. It includes several things: datetime, time, date, timedelta. . . So, often what you want is a datetime object from the datetime module, but you could do datetime.date.today().

One of the nice things about Python is that you should be able to see where something comes from anytime you're using it. If you're referencing something, it will either be defined in that file or be defined by something imported at the top. So, if you see "Site.objects.get_current()" you can easily search the file for where Site comes from. Maybe it's a Site class defined in the file itself. Maybe it's imported from django.contrib.sites.models. Maybe it's from somewhere else. The nice thing is that you can easily see where it comes from so that you can look up that code.

This is very unlike many languages. PHP's include()/require() could execute anything when you call them and define any number of things and you might not know where they come from so easily. I get push back on this from some of my friends who argue that good IDEs should track that for you, but I like that there isn't the ambiguity in Python.
I have striking insights into totalitarianism. The left, naturally, hates me.
I wish you could browse the available sets and DJs without signing up for an account. To force me to do that is a bit of a pain. I'd rather go back to doing some "real work" than to go through the trouble of signing up so I can explore your new site quickly.
I'd prefer if HN didn't become filled with dailywtf or best-of-craigslist like posts. Was this thought-provoking in any way, or was it an excuse to be smug about other people being smug? We can do better.