skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
twampss, who are you? You've (successfully, thanks!) submitted some of my posts in the past here and am wondering who you are.. you have a blog I can read too?
Well HN I am a bit disappointed in this "cant be done" give up attitude... I assure you it can and will be done.

I assumed you'd have the initiative to follow the links and read up on CU Spaceflight.... but apparently not (hint: that was a hint).

If that's not good enough then lets go with NASA...
http://academy.grc.nasa.gov/2008/group-project/new-launch-te...

They also have a design for a ballon to reach 110,000 feet which could carry up to a ton of equipment. I'm thinking centrifuge or "gun" launch at the altitude might go well :D
560 megabits/s is faster than USB 2.0 or Firewire400.

560 megabytes/s is probably too fast to matter for the average consumer.
2008: Rearden Commerce Has A Heck Of A Year
I'm doing a presentation today where I say that Arc is a failure and I always feel guilty about that. But the thing is, I think the real reason for the fail is in the book "Art and Fear." If you focus on quality, you end up with inferior quality compared to people who focus on quantity. You have a much better chance of creating a 100-year language if you create a 100 languages in a year.

Remember, Lisp is at least a 50-year language, and Lisp was originally created as a joke or a teaching example or something. The great bearded wonder, the one that Lisp guys make shirts of, Schultz or McCarthy or whatever his name was, only wrote up the spec to make a point, some kind of math thing iirc, and somebody egged him on and they ended up implementing it. But it wasn't that he just had this magic ability to build a great language. He made a thousand other snarky points in his life, and this one just happened to be so well phrased, mathematically, that it trumps all other languages, in the opinion of many people. That's not a one-time stroke of luck in the language design department; it's the results of decades honing his craft as a master of snark.
yeah but anybody who asks what language they should learn is an idiot. the answer is all of them, except the ones from Microsoft. everybody knows that.
The only reason Google's competitors have not been charging for these kind of services is because Google hasn't been. I imagine many competitors want Google to make this move as then it allows then to do the same and start building some much needed revenue.
If you removed the voting links on the front pages, I think that might help solve the problem.
Ask HN: Does clicking voting arrows *sometimes* take you to a blank page?
I'm wondering if it's just me or not. Sometimes when I click a voting arrow it takes me to a blank page instead of doing the Ajax request. I can't reliably reproduce this behavior though.

I'm using Safari / WebKit nightly.
Though it might be too computationally intensive, I would like to be change the ranking algorithm by adding a factor to increase or decrease the weight of votes from particular users.
My very-early stage startup just launched this facebook app.

I hope this community has use for a mechanism that helps you bypass expensive recruitment agents and job boards.

Lee.
The Apple Macintosh turns 25
doesn't happen to me, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
You should typically put something like "Review my app" in the title... I almost flagged this as spam.
I haven't been job hunting recently but from everything I hear the tech employment sector is doing fine. (I'm in the US)
Quote: "The Baby Boomers have had their moment in power. The most spoilt generation in history has handled affairs with its characteristic hedonism. The results are coming in."

Could not agree more, the younger generation is not spoilt or entitled: the baby-boomers are. Leaving the environmental and financial mess for us to clean up.
nope (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120121 Firefox/3.0.5)
A Quarter of Americans Aren't on the Web
don't see what the issue is.
If you actually need to change the markup on the form, then your only option would be to use our API to submit the data to our servers. Joe is correct in that we do have embedded methods that reduce the load on our server and allow you to handle the initial page load, but we do not have a method that allows you to use your own HTML (but you can use your own CSS). Posting to our servers DOES work, but if there are errors on submission they would be shown to the user on the hosted version of your form.
Don't know, but you could try looking at the author's submissions and comments in the Arc Forum, which include discussion of Rainbow:

http://arclanguage.com/user?id=conanite
I'd like to change the background color on the pages, maybe the text and font too.

Maybe figure out a way to be able to comment on older articles and have them still be seen.
Yes. It also supports features beyond the Arc "standard".
Pick any of these you like:

1) Ordering of articles by comment activity instead of votes

2) Ordering of articles by hits on a RegEx expression (which would persist between sessions for each user)

3) Listing of who's online now (reads/comments in the last 15 minutes or so)

4) Photos in the profiles

5) E-mail alerts when somebody responds to a comment I've made (for extra-cool points: allow email replies to auto-post)
The ability to put in your own ranking algorithm would be really neat.
Eventually everyone will be on the web because the quarter that aren't using it are in two groups: older Americans and rural areas. Older Americans will pass on and wireless technologies will connect rural parts of the country.
Also, for the record, there is this:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

It's not really a license, it just lets you certify that you are putting your work in the public domain.
Wow, model trains have gotten fancy! (http://www.marklin.com/CentralStation08.pdf)

The one I had as a kid looked like this: http://www.rubylane.com/shops/seniormovingspecialists/item/T... (though it was previously my dad's)
This has been posted here before, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=343571
My gut reaction would be to just let it be. Telling him that he can't sell it will lower his morale and possibly hasten his departure for a firm that doesn't mind (or for the project itself should the income prove to be at least enough to live off).

Does the item have value? He might be interested in selling it to you. If an employee likes his employer, they won't mind giving you their work for a little bit of money. You can always branch out into new areas.

Unless you're willing to make the employee a partner at your firm, I don't think there's much you can do that wouldn't seem "evil" and you don't seem like the evil boss type. If they're a partner at your firm, they get to direct the firm to an extent and share in its profits. If they're just a wage laborer, they will leave when something better comes along and that's one of the costs an employer must beat - and similarly the employee must bear that they cannot be paid the full value of their output as a wage laborer.

I'd say just let it be. Most web applications don't go anywhere. Be supportive and happy for him. In the case that it fails (or makes a few hundred dollars a month), he won't be leaving you and you'll come off as the awesome boss who is supportive of personal growth and chill with stuff. And that will make him stay even longer.
It's trying to insinuate that all governments are untrustworthy by extrapolating from a single data point. To put it another way: it's a cheap shot.
The issue is that coders can only load so much code into their brain at once. There's a huge switching cost involved in going from 'own-app' to 'company-app'. You are simply not as productive when working 2 significant projects at the same time.
Clojure does indeed seem like the hot candidate, but to repeat a point that pg has made several times: he's not interested in being 'hot'.
you're also not as productive if you play video games all night, or if you go drinking, or if you ...
The first epistle of St Bill
"But obviously, there are a lot of issues involved."

The issue here is that you have an employee that's passionate about what they do (shocker I know). A trait that's rare and should cause you concern only because there's a good chance this developer will jump ship to pursue their passion full time on their own.

I'd try to keep them employed (for you) as long as you can by encouraging this 'free time' project which will hopefully also influence your other developers to take up their own pet projects.

It's not the project that is of value, it's the engagement of the mind that benefits you and the work they create for you.
Wow!

The only thing I can think of as a next step is to install micro-webcams in the engines and have that virtual-world headgear to see the scenery from the model's viewpoint.

Amazing!
I think this idea will work. You can get people to update content for a specific location and act as an SME. Take it to the micro level like fare for taxi between locations. Downloadable pages of maps and hot spots to visit.
A HN classic. I hope Pie was also joking :)
ArsTechnica really? They are usually right on with privacy, political-tech, RIAA and EFF related issues. TC and CodingHorror I could do without.
The actual algorithms used were developed ten years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo... so it's not exactly an image recognition breakthrough.
Why does deflation cause unemployment and bankruptcy? It would make logical sense (to me at least) that if the dollar increases in value, then that would be better than the dollar losing value?
Fortune names NetApp best place to work
Uh, he referred to current US debt quite explicitly:

"As the bailouts in the current bust inexorably mount, financed in rapidly increasing U.S. government debt, one might wonder whether a default on Treasury debt is imaginable."

The point is not that the 1933 resolution would be used to justify a default. Basically:

(a) It's assumed that the US has never actually defaulted on a bond.

(b) Everyone assumes US Treasuries are safe, based on (a) (and of course other factors).

(c). However, (a) is controversial given that the 1933 resolution amounted to an effective default; US might have paid back the correct amount of nominal dollars but only because it unilaterally changed the definition of the dollar.

(d) Given (c), maybe it's not so prudent to assume that the US will never default (again) on a bond.
He's doing it in his own time - end of. If he's really that good then I would invest in his idea. If he is losing focus then kick him out. There's no absolutes here, just depends on how he works.
They should probably stay right where they are. I don't want anyone to hurt themselves.
Romanticizing cloud computing will destroy it
There's something to be said for trying to make an expressive language and worrying about how to make it efficient later. Only working with stuff you know you can do efficiently can lead to getting stuck in local maxima.
I know plenty of 30-something, 40-something and 50-something people who have the means, and access to the web but choose not to.

You'd be surprised at how many people in their 30's missed "that whole Internet thing" and could care less.

I'm 28, my first exposure to the web was 1995/6 when I was in high school. However among my peers I was in the minority of people who actually used the web (even today).
I just love articles like this. The economy's bad, but the upside to hiring is you can screw your new employees for a while.

It's one thing to suggest new hire salaries can be lowered a bit, but only offering internships, usually for little or no pay, or withholding benefits?

The real upside to hiring now (which is one of the benefits mentioned in the article, to be fair) is that a lot of great talent is in play.

But if you're hiring a top prospect, it's presumably for what they bring to the table. If you use the current conditions to push a new employee's compensation well below what you could afford to pay for the value they add, they'll be the first one out the door when things pick up again.
If you can't replicate, there is no bug.

Nothing to see here, move on please.
I'd quite like to be able to quote people via " > quote txt" please don't make it a clever "quote this post" button though, as then we'll just have everyone quoting entire posts.

flag/save a post? isn't that what bookmarks are for?

I would like to be able to hilight "friends" -- I made a greasemonkey script that people are welcome to use if they desire - http://is.gd/gXyh
PS I guess it varies between languages, but the wider community lists I'm on (Python, cx_Oracle, Matplotlib-users, Caml-list, a few others) are full of smart and helpful people.
also, maybe a "review my project" button for users over n karma? Clicking that allows them to submit a url and a description, and it gets submitted to a page similar to the jobs page.
Curbing Info Porn with Batched Reading
I think you are artificially separating "code" from "data" using the pizza topping selector idea. Edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445959

Let's say they want the ability to have themes which automatically occur for special events. Now you have the back end (keeping track of the order), GUI (what the user sees), interface builder, script builder (Interface for deciding which themes show up when), topping interface (name, cost, picture), Discount builder (for groups of toppings and groups of pizza's).

But, what is this script builder and what is this interface builder, and discount builder? Well we want scripts that can change the interface and add the holiday special toppings, and change the billing information. And we want a nice interface for changing the look and feel of the website. Great, but who is going to use them and what are they going to be doing?

A: The most flexible interface is always code. It's also to complex for the average user to understand. So we constantly get this pattern n * Developer > Script builder > Script Selector > User. The secret is creating the most useful easy to debug scripting language. You want them to say 2 weeks before Easter and they don't have to worry about when the full moon is.

Lisp is great because it understands this pattern and works well. Viaweb is a great example of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html, http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt, and there is also a good essay on their the scripting language they built but I can't find it.

PS: Once you realize your building a scripting language it's a good idea to consider what type of language your building http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html because while it might be fastest for your script to be written in the same language you code in your users want something that looks no more complex than BASIC. (See: Excel) However, if they want you to build the script's then you can just use your language / IDE and EVAL the script.
Their desktop os x client doesn't support Tiger, unfortunately.
Judge him only on his performance. If you can't do that then you are a bad employer. His work performance is what you pay for. It's up to him to make sure he delivers on that promise.
It would be interesting to compare adoption rates of previous technologies (telephone, television, electricity, ...) to those of PCs and the internet.
MystOnline: UruLive to be Open Source soon.
Yes, this has happened to me many times. The only correlation I ever had a hunch at was perhaps a long delay before hitting the arrow (like where I had opened a new tab and gotten to it later).

Reloading the page (which at that point is the previous page) gets rid of the problem.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009010220 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.5
Instead of inflating the dollar, the Fed should force banks, savings & loans, credit unions and other lending institutions to mark to market the assets they're holding. Kick out people who can't pay for their homes and put those homes on the market. Until this source of the problem is corrected, all other moves will be futile.

Many will lose homes but consider that, without that "bad" loan, they would have been renting instead. Now suppose we consider all payments they have made as a form of rent - then their situation doesn't look so bleak. Instead of paying off interest on a big loan, they were instead paying rent for a place more luxurious than they could otherwise afford. Not a bad deal really, but one whose time has ended.

The honest bunch of us must tolerate this crappy economic environment simply because politicians fear the phrase "losing their homes". Maybe Lakoff is correct - the secret to control is framing the debate.
Not to mention things like having children or relationships.
It doesn't mention Opera Mini which also has 21 million users - http://www.opera.com/smw/2008/10/
And I would guess there are many people who are nominally online, but only use the web/email "if they have to" (to get a cheap airfare, to keep in touch with their children, ...).
Being in a position to say "no" always helps with your negotiations. I would start looking for something about 12 months early. Scout around online, talk to people doing things you're interested in, etc.

I personally think that if you're skilled and flexible you could find something without too much effort. One thing that comes to mind is looking for some startup companies in a very early stage, where you could work from NZ for a bit before actually relocating. Then everyone knows it's a good fit and worth the hassle.

Downturn economies are often a good time for motivated people to do well, but it takes a lot of effort.
People don't always read HN from the same computer (and don't necessarily bother to keep bookmarks sync'ed between machines).
Google Announces Fourth Quarter And Fiscal Year 2008 Results
Startup oppurtunity?

By the way: Why are model railroads still expensive? Shouldn't the Japanese or Koreans (etc) have invaded the market by now with affordable, high-quality goods?
560 megabytes/s is probably too fast to matter for the average consumer.

You sure you don't want to put a expiration date on that statement? ;)
Thanks for the awesome responses guys, for those of you using craigslist, where do you post?
My misunderstanding. Enjoy the clarinet!
This can be really nasty for a small business. On the one hand, you understand the desire to build a seed for a software company, on the other you're dedicating scarce resources to pay this employee to work exclusively for you.

I'd tend towards overly-harsh on this one: You're either an employee or an entrepreneur. The choice is binary. We'd love to have you as an employee, but a person building their own business and riding on the salary we (a small business ourselves) pay while they do it is not welcome.

Every employer I had before heading off and starting my own company had an air-tight IP policy which basically owned my software-developing ass. That makes sense: You're either an employee or an owner, you don't mix the two.
See, that's the problem: when the ad strategy is targeted ads, if you don't present anything to target you get nothing back. I'm certain you're in the minority of users if you're not presenting information.
The thread system is nice to look at, but I think a place for direct replies would be incredibly useful for prolonging conversation.

Perhaps have a view for threads that lets you see only updated threads?
I'd disagree with their methodology. So, every Windows Mobile user who has downloaded Opera Mini to try it is considered an active Opera Mini user? Hogwash! Opera Mini has been downloaded 21M times which includes a substantial proportion of people who have downloaded it multiple times and users who have downloaded it to try it and never use it again.
"Good Enough": A Case Study (Ticketstumbler)
Games, drinks, children, etc. are diversions from the activities of software development and business which the employer is paying you to engage in on their behalf.

Participating in them outside of office hours would tend to _increase_ your productivity at work by giving your head a rest.
This simply isn't true, in fact for many the working on only one project is extremely boring and the home project may actually revitalize his interest and let him pursue more interesting work that further increases his skills. That increase in skills will benefit his other work projects.
It definitely has all the initial attributes: clear market niche, mature market with room for innovation, users willing to trade value for money.

You could do some really cool stuff, like a hardware box for train control that has wi-fi, OLED, and a web server. Combined with some custom equipment, like the engine/webcam idea or others and it could be a killer app/platform.

On the down-side, you need to be really close to the customers, you need to know what sells and what doesn't, and you need tight and immediate feedback as you try new ideas. You also need a way to communicate to lots of them at the same time -- repeatedly.

I think it's a great startup idea. I'd be concerned about those challenges though. The best situation would be to launch as part of a partnership with well-trafficked, locally-run hobby stores. Perhaps with the cooperation/endorsement of a large hobbiest club and good press from the model train magazines.

I don't think any of that is cheap or easy, but there's always obstacles.
It might be cool to let start-up owners attribute their company to the comments. Maybe it's just from using Facebook a lot, but I really like seeing where a poster comes from - if, of course, they choose to reveal that information.
Bulb Direct - Replacement bulbs | light bulbs for your equipment
Bulb Direct offers bulb selling and bulb replacement with customer satisfaction and guaranteed services at discount rates.
It's not a big if at all, representing a tree of nodes with attributes in an alternate syntax doesn't change the semantics of the markup. If they know HTML, they can learn an alternate markup style in minutes, it ain't rocket science.
CSS Browser Selector
Posted about a month ago. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404785 for the previous discussion.
Posterous.com and Tumblr.com should both have subdomains listed in the domain details.

For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446438
posterous.com -> tom.posterous.com
This also explains why 25% of people thought George W Bush wasn't "Worst President EVER", I guess.
Yes, but that's not something a company owner can control. If the employee is building, say, a website in his own time he is at the very least giving the owner the illusion that it is something he can control; in the end it all depends on the IP clause in the contract. For both employer and owner it is better to take on a "Don't know, doesn't hurt" attitude.
Thanks for the analysis.

The webcam idea may make it viral. Perhaps you can even implement controlling the trains via the net, so that you get a kind of train simulation. Though you would have to be in touch with customers to see if this is an idea that sells.
Wait if finding the median takes n time, and your sort takes n log n time then your best option is ~ n * log n * log n.
This is something I've wondered about for a while. Everyone says "Hang out in IRC"

That's great and all, but there's a lot of IRC servers with a lot of different channels. Got any specifics? Its almost like saying "I find using email gets me a lot of clients". Its specific enough to have an idea, but not enough to be of any use at all if you don't know where to start.
Citigroup, Bank of America ‘Nationalized’ as U.S. Calls Shots
I agree it can be pretty destructive in a small company, but what about big businesses? They're inefficient anyway, so the lost productivity is not such a big deal over there. Is it morally acceptable to freeload, but only in big businesses?
Radically Reinventing Venture Capital