skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. I use one for shortening: Bit.ly
2. I have HN for submitting
3. I have a tumblr I use as a personal bookmark repo for coding related finds
4. Send to ReadBag
5. And one for subscribing on Individurls.com (though that one gets very little use)
You Will Probably Fail in a Boring and Project-specific Way
I suspect that these things have a long development cycle.

OTOH, as long as it'll take line-in from an iPod, no problem.
WAG : http://www.library.gatech.edu/search/WAG_faq.php#1

GmailThis : http://contrapants.org/blog/2005/07/gmailthis.html

Tweetpage : http://www.nirmalpatel.com/web.html#tweetpage (shameless plug)

Awesome Highlighter : http://www.awesomehighlighter.com/user/welcome/

FindInPage : http://www.lifeclever.com/17-powerful-bookmarklets-for-your-... (for iPod Touch version of Safari)
It does, thanks.

I was letting apache do the threads, so under 100 probably.

Thanks for posting this - and staying on the thread. I should probably go back and re-read the thread now that I get what you are saying.
If I understand correctly, you need to pay a percentage and base transaction fee to process credit cards anyway. This service from Amazon bakes their cut into those two charges already. The Amazon charges are cheaper than competing services, but how do they compare to doing it yourself? Is that even an option?

This service sounds highly attractive except for the requiring of an Amazon account. Hopefully, that problem can be mitigated somehow. I'd have to have a good hard think.
If you're looking at Trac, also take a look at redmine. My last project used Trac, and it was a little clunky.

http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/Features

While you're at it, consider a continuous integration tool. Hudson worked great for us:

https://hudson.dev.java.net/
I don't get why people think Obama is in so much danger of assassination. Why a greater chance than any other president? Is it just that he's young and therefore reminds people of Kennedy?
Facebook’s traffic growth leaving rivals in the dust
Unfortunately our education system doesn't embrace this philosophy. I've known students who didn't take Calculus in high school because it would hurt their GPA. When we focus too much on initial performance we tend not to take risks and as the pottery example illustrates fail to learn.
Daptiv is a SaaS provider with great project management and built in collaboration features. Firefox or IE, nothing to install. Customers in many industries including software dev and gaming. www.daptiv.com
"confirm that 12 out of 82 people have been let go"

They had 82 people??? Wow. That seems a lot for a relatively young startup.
The letters were unsolicited but not completely irrelevant. I wasn't on the inside and didn't know the inside story, but I'd had a second interview with them and the lead developer discussed their desperate status and how other candidates had accepted other offers and/or decided on different career paths after this company had made offers to them. They made me an offer, actually, and they were definitely playing lowball, which is one of their primary mistakes, in my opinion. They'd stated that they appreciated my honesty and forthrightness in the interview, and given the lead developer's lament over their inability to attract good help, and in light of the offer twenty grand under my range, I thought that I might interject. It was a risky move, but it also presented a good gauge; if the dude can't take politely-worded, pertinent, and helpful advice from the point-of-view of a potential prospect advanced in the interview process, presented in a clean, non-harassing manner, I don't really want to work there.

If the girl in your analogy spent all of the first date talking about how guys just never seem to call her from her online profile, and then we went our separate ways, had a second date where the same laments were filed, went away again, and she made a change to a profile that was stupid, then it would be risky but sensible to politely inform her of some things that she could do to improve the appearance of her profile to prospects. That's what happened here.
Regardless of any technical improvements, MS is eager to dump the Vista name and associated stigma. This was their point with the "Mojave Experiment" ads: When given a product demo, people claimed to like a new version of Windows better than Vista, even if the new version was a just renamed version of Vista.

While the "experiment's" methodology is questionable, MS's quick release of Windows 7 indicates that they have faith in the results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mojave_Experiment
You should just do it yourself. This doesn't sound like a "micro-project," and you aren't going to be able to find a programmer who wants to do this for a "micro-payment." If it is a "micro-project" for a programmer, then that programmer is elite, and you can expect him to have a macro-hourly wage requirement.

Why don't you go ahead and list what you expect to pay for this project, and then the readers of this forum can let you know if you're off base, and by how much. If it's a very good and fair payment, I'm sure someone will offer to do it.

In fact, I know an excellent iPhone programmer who would be interested.
Screen Resolution market share:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=17

Resolution Total Market Share

1024 x 768 36.66%
1280 x 800 19.62%
1280 x 1024 12.68%
1440 x 900 8.30%
1680 x 1050 5.48%
800 x 600 4.49%
1152 x 864 2.88%
1920 x 1200 1.86%
1280 x 768 1.82%
1280 x 960 0.92%
1400 x 1050 0.72%
1600 x 1200 0.65%
1280 x 720 0.59%
320 x 396 0.53%
1366 x 768 0.24%
1024 x 600 0.24%
1360 x 768 0.21%
1280 x 854 0.20%
1152 x 720 0.14%
1600 x 900 0.13%
1344 x 840 0.12%
1920 x 1080 0.10%
2560 x 1600 0.09%
1024 x 640 0.08%
Unknown 0.06%
640 x 480 0.06%
1536 x 960 0.06%
240 x 320 0.05%
1600 x 1024 0.05%
240 x 160 0.04%
I am thinking about doing this with an emacs mode [spartan emacs] and darcs.
sorry... Barbados.
What about exploding iPods and mobile phones?
Hah...no. Age of Conan didn't take much of a dent at all in WoW's numbers. It had a lot of hype, but the hard core pretty much gravitated back to WoW since AoC's endgame was pretty much non-existent, at least from what I heard (I only made it to level 11).
If only there was a good way to make this work with the iPhone...
The text on the lighthouse site is irritatingly Web 2.0ish.
Yikes, be very careful with the audio on screencasts. It sounds highly unprofessional to have smacking sounds on audio - and additionally, it should not auto-start.
Target shooting scores and analysis with python
Output from kada2 (python script for displaying and analysing target shooting club scores)
First time I read that, it sounded like the title of another useless, obvious patent.

"A method for faster performance through accelerated playback"
I could be wrong but I imagine support staff accounts for a large portion of that.
pointless article - counterfactual should state that they are probably better at this than you are. outages should be expected and managed for - expectations of 100% uptime ignore reality. BTW power cuts can affect productivity too, how many of you have your own deisel gen-set sitting idle outside right now?
"If not buy, how about just pump some cash into them, the way Microsoft famously once did with Apple?"

"What about Google.org, Google's for-profit philanthropic arm, which is investing in alternative-energy startups?"

Is it just me who finds those suggestions bizarre to ludicrous? They're practically begging.
It is a bite more than a fad. I met someone and told them I was doing a startup and she did not know what a startup was. After I explain her that I wanted to create a tech company she seemed to understand a bit more but still proceeded to yarn. Fast forward three weeks later she asks me if I knew about Twitter "this website that.....". "This Website" showed me that Twitter was now mainstream.
I've used wxWidgets for 7+ years now and loved it even in the early days when the GUI tools sucked and the OpenGL support was poor, but now it's very well polished and my choice for GUI development under linux. If my app needs to be ported to Windows, I just re-compile and it's all nice if I use the wxWidgets version of the network libs, etc ...
I should have specified that it is actually multiplatform. The site currently natively supports about 15 MMO games, and has an interface for customizing and specifying your own game parameters (level cap, tradeskills, classes, races, etc).

WoW is just the biggest player by far. Currently I host approximately 88% WoW guilds. The other "bigger players" are EQ, EQ2, Warhammer, AOC, FFXI, and LOTRO, with Warhammer being the biggest non-WoW game at 2%.

WoW just has so many more players.
Obama is the first black President of the United States, and there are a lot of racist idiots who would love to make his tenure as short as possible.
Since it took some non-trivial googling to figure out what "[spartan emacs]" referred to.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SpartanWiki
Protect your computer against cats ...
> The problem is that there is a difference between a call to improve yourself and a call to quit and find other work, you’re hopeless.

I think it can also depend on the attitude of the person who is being called. Depending on the perspective and frame of mind of the person reading the call, they might take a call for improvement and interpret it as a call to just give up and leave. That people will interpret one as the other is not always the fault of the poster; some people are just defensive, and some will end up publicly whining when called out that they are being defensive. Not to say people can't be assholes, but they can also read too much emotion and spite into things that have none.

Also, and this may be a somewhat unpopular opinion, there is nothing wrong in making judgments and having strong opinions about things, be them people or ideas. Declaring in advance that things can't be ranked doesn't make it so, even if it leads to a period of forced harmony.

> I judge others’ competencies, in my own mind if nothing else. It’s just that when I do, it always leaves me feeling dirty and antagonistic. It makes me protective over my own ideas and not a very good team player.

This strikes me as conflating two discrete ideas. There is judging other peoples' competencies and ideas, and there is being prideful and protective of one's own. Either the latter is assumed to exist, or it is assumed to be implied by the former. I think this is wrong, and I think the assumption that it is true leads to more conflict than is necessary. That one thinks something to be true does not mean that they have to pridefully defend it. Be able to gracefully be proven wrong. Realize that the person is probably gauging your reaction to the argument presented as much as they are the statement you made that provoked the argument, possibly more so.

A lot of times when I've witnessed programmers passing judgment, it was not the disagreement that caused the problem. It was the lack of humility in one, or both, of the parties involved. They either refused to accept good evidence reasonably presented, or they would whine about being a victim of a personal attack. I rarely see reasonable people being kicked to the curb, because usually they are reasonable about where they are wrong, and what their abilities and talents are.
Throw your credentials together and hit up some companies that you admire.

VC backed companies are almost always fond of free labor, provided that it is good labor.

At a past company, I had some guy come to our office looking for an intern position. He was just going to various companies in the office complex where we were based and seeing what they had available. I liked his drive and the fact that he seemed to present himself well, so I gave him a job for 2 summers. It was a good deal for both of us, he learned a ton, and was cheap labor :)
This is response to the comment in the HN item

"Ask HN: How to make something awesome out of Motion Detection"

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423865)

in which someone said that they wanted an auto nuke launcher to take out the cat when it walked on the keyboard.
Didn't they also ship all Macs with OS 9 and an optional OS 10 disc until 10.2 or something like that? What annoyed most people was that they couldn't get XP as easily anymore.

Edit: OS 9 was the default until the release of OS 10.1.2. Thank you Wikipedia.
Awesome concept, I'm jealous of Ted's drive and motivation
Hm, how to transfer this article to my life? Put "leap without looking" on my TODO list? Sorry, but I have to rank this among the less useful advice I have heard...
Hey everyone. Sorry I've been ages responding to this, I've been away for some time. I've integrated each piece of feedback on this page, thank you all for your input. The app was a quick way of picking up Rails, and I have worked on several larger projects since. Some of it is quick and dirty as I do this in my spare time, and I now mainly use it to test out new ideas. The casual 'key' based authentication was a concept I wanted to try out, and a to do list is a good opportunity as the data is rarely sensitive, and the risk of someone deleting/marking a task complete is outweighed by the convenience of an authentication method that allows for the bookmarking of your to do list (louislouis - I was also using a simple text editor for keepign lists! Now I use my own app to keep track of all tasks from my clark-kent job, personal life, startups, small web apps etc.). Thanks again!
That's clearly not a fact at all! There are lots of things that companies do that aren't directly billable to clients. What is a fact is that either you spend the money paying someone to do something, or you spend the money paying someone to do nothing.
Have you come across Yahoo!’s YSlow plug-in for Firebug? It scores your page against their “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site”, and is handy for looking at the page’s external resources and relevant HTTP headers.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
Rally at http://rallydev.com. There's a free version.
Porn industry has been making a lot more profits than car makers, they don't pollute the environment, don't lobby for banning foreign competition, they're better for the economy in every imaginable way, and deserve bailout a lot more than GM.
Ugh, I hate normal cross-platform toolkits. Different platforms do different event, layout, rendering order, etc. etc. etc. You can't map closely back to native L&F without getting that stuff right. And if you get it right on one platform, you've chosen to get it wrong on all others.

Cross-platform toolkits have a certain 'uncanny valley' of their own in this respect: only instead of rendering quality, it's native widgets. If you don't do native widgets, you're not going to look right. I have yet to see a toolkit do its own widgets that look like the originals.
I am sick of the recency bias. It turns smart programmers into blackbirds with the "oooh shiny" phenomenon. People are spending more time keeping up with things that just don't matter. I know I certainly spend much less time scouring research sites (pubmed/citeseer et al) than before.
OLPC cuts 50% of staff
I believe I read once that advertisers have software that reduces the length of the pauses between words/sounds in a video to speed it up, without it seeming as sped up.
There have been conflicting reports (just Google it a bit), but it appears that the secret service has been notified of significantly many more death threats than usual.
Really? I didn't really look at the main site, but the blog portion seemed like... well, a blog. Nothing nonstandard, as far as I could tell. And the font was just blown-up Helvetica, though the letter-spacing did seem a little wide.
Front-end Performance: Doing More With Less
Bear in mind that if you take big risks there's a 99% chance you'll be the reason it's a risk :-)
I wonder why twitter doesn't build a application platform like facebook?
I have also run into this problem. I have tried at different moments in time Gtk, it's C++ bindings, wxWidgets, Java+AWT/Swing, Qt.

I couldn't agree more that all of them have major drawbacks. We need a good, simple to use, well-designed, fast cross-platform C library.

Do you care to start doing it? Other than doing your own, I think the most sensible choice is wxWidgets, which, from my point of view, only has one big problem: the API (i.e. code doesn't look pretty, bad C++ (no exceptions), and it can take a while to compile).
Using LLVM to generate fast machine code from Haskell
FogBugz. It's free for startups. But I'm the president of Fog Creek so maybe I'm biased ;)

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/StudentAndStartup.html
Yes this was mostly support staff. The main reason for this is that we have become much more efficient and automated so we did not need as many support staff anymore to support our systems.
If you have used YSlow before you might be interested in the upcoming YSlow 2.0. I just came across a slideshow while looking for URLs for my comment above. The extensibility looks quite interesting.

http://www.slideshare.net/stoyan/yslow-20-presentation/
I also recommend TRAC. And I recommend my ISP too - WebFaction - which gives you integrated SVN/TRAC out of the box, along with any database or programming language you need. A small slice costs $9.50/month.
Myth TV can run playback at faster (or slower) than real time, and does pitch correction.

My sweet spot seems to be 1.5x-3x depending on content. Movies tend to lose nothing no matter how fast you watch them, while technical stuff gets hard to follow really fast.
The api to the service provider may be seen as an application protocol, but Twitter is a platform.
> comprehend higher pitched, slightly faster than average, voices better

That's definitely true. Not comprehending them takes years of married life and continuous practice.
> Our traders simply execute what our researchers models tell them to

Can the traders be eliminated? Why pay them if all they do is carry out orders? (I am asking sincerely)
The Psychology of Faces
Ask HN: What to do in an equity disagreement in a startup
(This is an anonymous account.)

I work with two other co-founders on a startup. We're angel funded, though our angel took an obscene amount of equity for the little money he put in (in the 10,000-50,000 range) due to something that happened before I started to work at the startup.

I joined after the first two founders, Austin and Michael, started to work on it. Michael recently quit another startup to work on this one. (these are pseudonyms.)

I joined as the developer/a bit of business. I was the sole developer and designer of the site, of course with Austin's and Michael's non-writing-code assistance. Both guys aren't MBA-touting douchebags looking for "a hacker to make their startup a success!" - they're very knowledgeable in technology and the web, as well as business/entrepreneurship.

I originally was to receive 20% of the company. However, Austin wasn't happy with receiving only 20%, and thus wanted 24%. That meant that my equity holding was going to be reduced to 16%. (We are incorporating soon.)

Michael's all for what makes everyone more motivated to work on the startup, and the team up to this point didn't have any major disagreements or conflicts.

I surely don't want to cause any conflicts at all, considering I'm the guy that recently joined. However, I think that I'm entitled to a bit more than 16%. 20% was satisfactory for me.

What do you think I do? Suck it up and accept 16% or try to receive more?

If you'd rather not comment here, shoot me an email at newsyc@spam.la.

Thanks in advance.
Cancer and Statistical Illusion
You will probably fail because you give up.

Starting a business from scratch in a market that doesn't exist is like solving an equation with Newton's method, and you're starting with a really, really bad guess.

The first iteration or two is almost always a complete failure. You get such poor results you can't even tell which knob to turn to get better results. You start with another guess, maybe a different business altogether. It takes a lot of persistence even to get to the point where you can figure out that you're onto something that might work as a real business. Then it takes a lot more work to get to the point where you even HAVE knobs and dials you can turn to try to fine tune the business so it actually works.

I asked Jessica Livingston to speak at the business of software conference, and I suggested that she talk about all the ways Y-Combinator startups fail. "That would be boring," she told me, "it's always they same thing: they just stop working on it."
Sea ice area returns to 1979 level
Often, I wonder if this kind of public news hurts them (or any company) overall.

Would you be less tempted to use Engine Yard for hosting knowing that they just laid off some folks? Even slightly?

And if so, would it be worth keeping these folks around just so you aren't making "negative press" for yourself?
Perhaps not gingerly, but thoroughly and convincingly? yes.

Thanks. I love me some tech history, especially in rebuffing egotistical claims.
Did Corkd Get Hackd?
Data-mining and the ability to respond to Twitter users looking for something would be huge.
Hardware that supports iPhoto '09's geotagging
Paid app? Splitting the revenue?
I would like to see and try that, since my perception is that unless one deliberately adds them, there are no pauses between words. (Try to listen to a foreign language radio station and identify where the words are, for instance).
`multiprocessing` module is in the Python's stdlib.
I think it all depends on wording. EY's official blog statement talked about helping the employees find new jobs, which is impressive. To me, it would also be beneficial for them to include a statement like Ezra's above, to ease customer or potential customer concerns: They laid of support staff because they have further automated their environment - that is reassuring.
Re-Google.org: In the proceeding answer Schmidt talks about newspapers as "doing the public good" - something we usually think of when we think of non-profits. He even mentions a non-for-profit news organization (not NPR). I think it makes a lot of sense. I agree with Schmidt that these organizations can't just fold; they are a vital part of our democracy.
In other words, don't optimize/scale prematurely... building a product that people want to use is many times harder than scaling that product.
AFAIK they didn't push 10.0 as being truly production ready, but they shipped it on macs so that developers would take it seriously.

Hence why it was shipped with the macs, but not the default booting OS for some time.
So what is the sweet spot of Haskell in the Real World? What is its comparative advantage over other languages? Where is using Haskell, and not C, Erlang, Java, Forth, Cobol, Ruby or Lisp going to be a big win?
Rate limiting with memcached
Is this a real product?
I have a found using Beanstalk and Basecamp together to be absolutely awesome. It gives us the ability to use todos/milestones as well as establish polices (coding standards, design docs, etc) on Whiteboards.

The best part - and what gets the most use - is Messaging/comments. The ability to post comments directly related to a commit has become insanely powerful for our 2-man crew.

Best of all, you can do it all for free.
factors are nothing but enums and are used to shrink data and speed processing. Plus that matches what you typically want to happen in regressions: strings turn into (n-1) indicator variables. Otherwise, what is the meaning of using a string as an explanatory variable in a regression?

If you want to merge data frames that were created w/ different factors, perhaps the easiest thing to do is turn your factors into strings?

If d is your data frame, then:

d$factorVar <- as.character( d$factorVar )

merge your two data frames, then

merged$factorVar <- as.factor( merged$factorVar )

should set you right...

earl