skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would love that, but I doubt websites would support it :-)
I think the most interesting thing for me was the whole idea of using tools like this to visualize and monitor code with somewhat complicated dependencies.

I'm pretty sure there'd be heaps of useful applications for this kind of tech. Have you got something in particular in mind?
left a bad taste in my mouth for him to rationalize why it's not good (and encourage me to list more reasons in my head), and then do the opposite and encourage us to vote for someone. especially knowing that he has a readership my i left thinking about power and responsibility and muckiness.

not much idea about what i was supposed to vote on. evens out if he's not so persuasive?
> A better solution would be to tell people to research what they're investing in, if it doesn't look right or you can't understand it don't invest in it.

Unfortunately for most people, that's almost everything.
If we didn't have an monetary policy of inflation, merely depositing money in a savings account would be a viable option.
The demo shows the actual keys being pressed down. They also say that the recording is stored on their server. Does this mean that if I used their services on my site, they'd have a recording of my user logging in? If so, how would I be comfortable with this, without knowing whether or not the recording contained the username/password of my visitor, and who can see these recordings?

I'd trust this service more, if it was a script, and the recordings were stored on my server only.

David Timar
"It is completely positive and OK to be depressed when someone dies ..."

Depression is not the same as sadness. Depression is a vicious circle, often fueled by inner chemicals. Sadness can be OK, depression is never.
Wow. This article seems to be able to be boiled down to, "Because people are fed up with poor pay or being overburdened in traditional 9-5 jobs, they are trying to get more freedom and happiness. And this is just RUINING all our bad business practices and making all these POOR MANAGERS frustrated."
Less pay? Please. If you get a good name when you start out gigs you want will come to you and you will earn much more after expenses than you did at a previous employer doing similar work.

Also this whole article reads like an overreaction.
"Get Jim on this meeting" - Buffoon Boss
"Jim's not in today" - on top of things clerk
"Lets bring in Julie who knows nothing"
etc...
Maybe a "Theocracy of Hackers" is what you call a meritocracy you can't really understand.

Not to say Walker is not... quirky.

But a tech company loses a lot when it's not driven by hackers.
After reading this, I tried to become member to their website and they force me to chose a state even if I least my country as france and ask me for a phone number to be formatted according to the way americans format their phone numbers.
I guess they don't get that many foreigners using their website....
I've found PyGTK is a joy to use, but the major downside for me is that it doesn't use native controls.

It mimics them with a theme on Windows, so presumably it looks okay (though I suspect it misses the finer details).

But on OSX, with its very distinctive widgets, GTK just looks horrible :(
I've never heard of that belief, and a Buddhist posting on the original blog mentioned the same. Must be some specific flavor of Buddhism.
LG introduces the 3G phone, but its not a phone... its a watch... a 3G watch
I won't say this is the best thing I've ever read on the subject, since that would imply I have sufficient knowledge of the financial markets to accurately evaluate what I'm reading.

Instead, let me say this seems, or feels like the best thing I've read on the topic.

In addition to relating the crisis to the Martingale betting system, the author describes how an ecosystem of bettors tends to converge on a Martingale-like system when playing with other people's money, and taking a percentage of the stake as a fee.
It also loses a lot when the founders & the core move on to other things.
Interview Questions for Software Developers
"...The only solution is to forbid money management as we know it..."

That's a bold and provocative statement. I'd feel a lot better if the author actually proposed some way of ending "money management as we know it" instead of just throwing the blurb out willy-nilly.

Nobody disagrees about the premise: markets will always seek to find loopholes in the system and in the human condition. Some people see this as a source of growth -- after dozens or scores of such blowups, beginning way before the Dutch Tulip Bubble in 1637, markets have continue to grow and become more and more sophisticated. Whatever the fundamental flaws, it's obvious they haven't prevented outstanding growth over the last several hundred years or so.

To propose a dramatic new solution, it's your job to make the case that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Otherwise it's like speaking out against eating because of all of the cases of food poisoning -- you're missing the point.
oh no no that is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for your comments I will add to them right away. Do you think it is a workable concept?
yeah it should do it when the slider stops, so if it starts at 0 and you move it to 5 and stop, then it should place a rating at 5. is this happening for you?
Hosting, Commodities, and "The Cloud"
Qt's a bit better than GTK on OS X, but it's still, sadly, not great. Qt tend to look out of place on OS X. Some of it seems curable -- e.g. simple things like getting margins right and so on, and other things are more complicated since in places Qt is trying to support interface elements that aren't used on OS X.

You can kind of see this with a few high-profile Qt apps like Google Earth, Opera, and the Last.fm client, the last being the best looking, but mostly because Max has put a lot of effort into making it not look like ass.
duplicate? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427292
A question of piracy
ISteam for iPhone earns a bunch of 22-year olds $100,000 in one month
Also worth checking out:
http://www.shapeways.com
My experience with gigs is that if you do your job well you'll make more $ and have more freedom.
I don't have a lot of faith that outlawing performance-based money management yields a stable system either. (I do agree that it is likely to yeild one less to synchronized catastrophic implosions, until it naturally devolves back into what I've seen twice in my 4 decades on the earth.)

Suppose we "agree" that 6% is the safe rate of return, and no money manager is allowed to collect fees or bonuses based on performance. The next logical step for anyone with a relatively large amount of money is to try to build their own in-house (or in-family) money management arm to generate 7% or 8%. If that attempt is successful, by whatever means including blind luck, that money manager can go take his expertise elsewhere with a track record of "proven high returns", or get a not exactly fund performance based raise or bonus. (Call it a corporate profit-sharing bonus, or retention bonus, etc.)

Logically, once one group is doing it, others will try to follow. No wealthy family is going to sit by generating 6% when someone in their same situation is generating 8%. Those that don't have large enough investment nuts to start with will pool with other not-quite wealthy investors, and eventually this will trickle down to the common mutual fund. And then we'll see "funds of funds" (or funds of fund, as we saw recently) that will take money, invest in the latest 8% fund, pay out 7% (still beats the 6%) and pocket 1% for expenses.

Trying to legislate away greed is like pissing in the ocean.

IMO, you need people to feel like risky investments are risky investments. If they instead feel like they own an implied governmental put on their risky investments, you just get more and more comfort with risk. People who make bets that they can't cover need to feel the pain, and for those fallouts to become public in the form of bankruptcies.

Banishing an entire category of financial work (fee-based money management) because of some crooks, some bad bets, and some large failures is not the path to a productive and efficient means of distributing capital to the businesses who need it to generate growth, jobs, and new products, IMO.

I worry that a logical outcome of this proposal would be an end to pooled-risk VC funds, and a substantial impairment to the liquidity and transparency of the public markets. It makes for a good blog entry though, as long as you don't think about it too hard.
Intermediate code will obfuscate code's intent. Why require from the optimizer to reverse-engineer what you meant from a description at a different (lower) level of abstraction?
Nice.. this will be a big win for writing commercial linux apps.
So I'm watching the stream, and he just politely asked the viewers to "please stop hacking", then started working on a regex to filter non-alpha numeric characters.

Was it seriously just echo-ing the raw input to a shell? Wow. Just wow.
IT Executives shouldn't keep their jobs if they recommend production services for EC2?
Very cool-- though griefers make the world much less fun for anyone but themselves.
I don't see this person doing anything wrong. People are envious of someone else doing well.
Interesting read... not sure I whole-heartedly agree though!
On the philosophical level, "code's intent" is to run on a machine using machine language. Practically speaking, I've never seen any problem that couldn't be solved by analyzing intermediate code.
When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?
IYogi Partners with GlobalLogic to Create "Generation V" Technical Support Platform
iYogi today announced a software product development partnership with GlobalLogic Inc. to create a "Generation V" services platform for iYogi's proprietary technical support application framework, iMantra. The fastest growing direct-to-consumer and small business support brand from India, iYogi has more than 50,000 subscribers worldwide.
Agreed strongly:

One reason for this is that Paulson was able to recognize and act on the unimaginable—that the banks, which took on most of the subprime risk, had no clue what they were holding or how much it was worth.

More Paulsons and maybe the banks might have 'imagined' this possibility. How is it possible to be morally outraged with the irresponsible banks and Paulson.
Upvoted not for the $100K/mo, but the cool use of microphone, gravity sensor, touch screen, and speaker to simulate a surface with condensation on it.
perfectly sized and flexible dog poop bags.

relaxing morning read without getting sucked into internet. i still prefer the multiple perspectives and interaction i get from web 2.0 news, but i can imagine the nostalgia for simpler, more passive times :-)

also, nytimes is really annoying to read online because i have to find login info.
Stop using your RSS reader
Fred Oliveira writes about how ditching his RSS reader makes him more productive while staying in the loop.
Yes, absolutely! I spent nearly 4 years working in a hospital on the EMR systems. Seeing your software in use when a patient is coding in the CCU is both humbling and exciting - the patient lived. It motivates you to tighten the UI and insure data quality beyond what you'll do for any other field. Having severe budget constraints - I believe - caused us to be more innovative than any other IT department or vendor I've worked for.
Could I make one that remembers passwords. I hate having to retype them in all the time! Oh and also I want to replace it's braindead caching scheme. If I switch to a different window, and switch back, why on earth would it think to reload the page??
Was it seriously just echo-ing the raw input to a shell?

Wouldn't shock me. How much QA could he have done on an app that was thrown together in response to a web comic posted in the last dozen hours?

Yeah, best practices and all that... But sometimes it's also fun to watch people attempt to exploit things.
Though he doesn't suggest it in so many words, I understood him to be proposing that money managers must be paid a flat rate rather than by commission based on returns or total money managed, that it would remove their incentive to take short-term risks to run up their personal reward.
The Printer that Prints (60% of) Itself
sunday funnies
As I just posted on your blog:

I'm sorry to be harsh, but you're completely off-base with this rant.

"College Education is a Waste of Time"

Just like anything else, it's how you utilize that education. I built relationships with VCs, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, media, and many people who have been helpful and will continue to be helpful later in life. I built a company while in college. I lived my life while in college. People can't help but hear me out because of my specific college affiliation and my accomplishments there.

Everything's a waste of time if you don't know how to use it.

"College education is just a piece of paper"

No, it's not. It's a series of relationships, friendships, and knowledge that people can and do use. It's a door opener. VCs already know a lot about my qualifications when I walk into the room. The only person that can devalue that "piece of paper" is you.

"What is there after college?"

Whatever you want to do. I took the entrepreneurial path, not the "salary" path you generalize with.

I'll end it there, but the point is, you have it completely wrong. Nothing's a waste of time if you build meaningful relationships, knowledge, and happiness during that time.
It seems that they are increasing the reach of their propaganda by releasing content about one side of the conflict.
same here. the $100k/mo made for a catchy title. read further and you see the tech and user vision (drawing space) and implementation are hot.
I'd extend the definition to include things like GRIN code.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.27.3...
Sorry, I meant shouldn't. All this reading is getting in the way of monitoring HN threads :).
Not really. But I played around with graphviz for visualizing railroad schedule graphs. It was quite pleasant --- and beats starring at the adjacency lists.
That sounds like an idea for a web app... a comics aggregator. You can even have it be customizable for each user, and have something new every day.
Ironic that he of all people ended up buying a house at the height of the bubble.
Very awesome! A lot of people like spamming the n-word however. Jesus.
Hmm... I guess that newspapers' collapse means mostly lack of deep analysis in one place; instead, you'll have to find them in many blogs, and sometimes it is hard to either find them or evaluate their credibility.

There's also a personal bit. My mother used to work for a small local newspapers for many years; she's not working there anymore but somehow I felt, especially in the small communities, newspapers integrated the people and them more aware about the local events.
Ask HN: Are Funny Code Comments Useful?
I am wondering if anyone has worked on an open-source project where people, regularly, included a little humor in their code.

Did this make the project go faster, and development more fun, or was it just distracting?

Funny examples of your own would be appreciated.
Last.fm are giving away their ballpit. Are you interested?
Serious offers considered to balls@last.fm
And short sellers are the defense of capitalism against bubbles. (Not always working --- but at least they have an incentive to pop bubbles.)
I don't care that much, but I can see why people might. He didn't create value. Like, when PG creates something, it adds a certain value to society. Even when PG puts money behind a firm like Disqus, he enables value to be added. This guy didn't create any value or enable value creation. He just saw a situation he could take advantage of.

The banks had created value, but not as much as everyone had thought and he took advantage of that. It's part of our system and that's fine and all, but it certainly isn't something I'm going to be all, "that's the way to do it!" He didn't do anything wrong. He played by the rules from what I know.

However, he really took advantage of something in a way that raises moral questions. Remember the valentine's episode of Futurama? Bender is selling roses and when he knows that Fry is over a barrel he hikes the price incredibly saying that demand just skyrocketed. Yeah, it's how our system works and I don't really disagree with your sentiment, but it still leaves me feeling a little gross about him as a person. Capitalism allows you to act without regard for morality so long as it's within the law and that's fair game. Doesn't mean we need to like the people who do act that way.
Because that's just an extended version of Prototype, not really a completely different direction. Everything in mootools is compartmentalized into "Element" or "Hash" or "Array" and latches onto the existing object types.

I want to make something that avoids that and is very simple to use.
Even in jest I would never want to make a comparison between the Draize Eye Test and a new software system built on a relatively new language.
Grabup has a closer functionality to pastebin. It's Mac only. Basically it adds functionality to the standard screen capture keyboard shortcut. You make the grab and then grabup will upload the screenshot and put a url in your clipboard. So you can just paste a link to someone.
it works for me when the slider stops and I release dragging, is that what it should do?
I already miss watching my grandma do the crossword and crypt-o-quip puzzles. :`(
Wow. Just wow.

The purpose of college isn't vocational training. It never was. My college education is not, was not, and never will be "a piece of paper". That's just plain ignorance. The kind of ignorance that just might get cured by someone who cared enough to get a decent college education.
I'll miss actually holding a newspaper in my hands. Folding it into the perfect size. Tossing a particular section over to somebody within my vicinity with articles circled. I'll miss ripping articles out and putting them on the fridge or a cork board. I'll miss taking silly putty, pressing it up against the sunday funnies and reading it off of the pink blob. I'll miss sharing a newspaper with somebody on the bus after I'm done with it. There's a bonding that happens when you're able to leave information with somebody else in a truly tangible manner.

There's a whole cognitive aspect to newspapers that Seth is deliberately ignoring. Maybe it's nostalgia, but still. That's what I'll miss.
Being able to read news on the subway where there is no wireless access for my phone.

Getting a wider net of news. Maybe others read more broad news online, but mine tends to be filtered down a lot and so I lose out on certain local stories and stories that I might not otherwise be interested in, but seem worth reading after I've read them as a captive audience of their editing.
I agree. Don't waste time and money in college.
Start your own business.
But keep yourself learning all your life.
Online, business and management skills.
Offline, social skills, the power of word.

New times we're living, adapt and evolve.
I think so! I think the trick is to allow users to use it from the youtube.com site -- make it really really easy to rate videos.
You almost want some form of bot that posts a comment on users video page if they're rated x times ("your video has been ranked on skuttlefish - the most popular part is y, and the least popular is z - rate this video here")
I just found this. Apparently the Linux kernel is primarily written by sailors.

http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/
And limited liability on the down side!
Not unless they bring back gigantic Winsor McKay-style full-page illustrations. Or long-form Will Eisner-style comic tales. Otherwise I'll read 'em online. Small one-to-five panel jokes work just as well online.

The last comic I can remember that tried to take any real advantage of the print medium was Calvin and Hobbes.
Really? The things I learnt at university were priceless - even though it was economics it just gets your brain trained. And it's a signally device - you have a good degree from a good uni; people flock to you.
Youtube disables audio for video that contains unauthorized copyrighted music
Quite. If the downturn hadn't happened, people would have been happy enough to take his (and his investor's!) money.
JQuery 1.3 Released
How old are your friends who are thriving as independents? The "freedom and opportunity" are a great deal less glamorous for those in their late 40s who are just trying to raise kids and provide for the family...
Using closures in Java
I agree completely.

There seem to be a lot of web-startups that don't really have a firm grasp on colo/hosting/virt servers/etc. It strikes me as strange that the server availability part of their business is often seen as some uninteresting messy thing to be outsourced to the lowest bidder.

EC2 is great for giving you moderately cost effective dynamic computing cycles. I personally think that EC2 makes for an expensive sucky web-host, and my guess is that over time (by the end of 2009) people will better understand EC2's niche.
The article was interesting but I really didn't like the tone, it was almost as if the author was sneering at the man. He tried to make him seem all sheepish and quiet, then try to lay guilt on him for doing his job well, and then mocking him for making a bad housing investment.
Oh, something like train timetables? Or you mean something like generating railroad maps?

Edit: While googling, I came across this http://railroad.rubyforge.org which is also a pretty cool use of graphviz. But probably different to what you're talking about. :)
He is suggesting that top executive and trader pay be based on the long term performance of the fund. In particular, their own money should be invested in everything they do, and likely also for a number of years after they leave.
The only newspaper I would miss is The Economist - global, comprehensive, opinionated (for good or bad), analysis in depth. But I won't have to miss it, since The Economist is doing very well, probably for precisely the same reasons that so many people like me would miss it...
Won't miss anything, haven't picked up a newspapers in years.
I don't see that to be true. There are plenty of low-risk, low reward options out there if all you want to do is preserve your value.

Inflation has its own issues, but as I see it they are mostly social class related.
The Economist is the only paper I subscribe to, actually. Other ones, like Financial Times, I pick sometimes.
"virtual web hosting from the 80s"

I would say that EC2 is considerably better than web hosting ever was in the 1980s.
I'm not confident that blogs will replace professional commentators. I don't know any blogs that have the same kind of quality as the Financial Times comment section (except Willem Buiter's, which the FT publishes). The same goes for something like The Economist. These people are paid to write, and given budgets that allow them to research stories. They are a world away from unpaid blogging.
But, would it beat a dead horse?
Ooh, this meme again! Now, everyone line up and form teams and repeat your arguments from last time!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=275258

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=115158

I think this one does win a prize for being the least articulate version of the three. ;-)