skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Environmentalist Creates Uproar at Oil-Lease Auction by Running Up Prices
Awesome! Thanks.

http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/doc/sect-extending-python...
Yeah - its a good read - his approach seems quite at odds with the currently heavily talked about "agile" approaches.
This postings is now showing 45 points and 45 comments. A few minutes ago it was 44/44. I wonder - what is the significance of the comment/point ratio?
Cant anyone get the beta anyway?
I just downloaded it last night from: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.asp...
They certainly pull some of the same tricks as Valleywag, but they have decent, reasonable stuff some of the time.
It might be. If these "people" were clowns.
Emacs key bindings please.
As a law student I would love for this to happen. Charles Nesson is a first rate lawyer. We have studied several of his cases in law school so far.

It would be a good learning experience to see an experienced lawyer in action. Sure beats reading hundreds of pages of trial transcripts. Reading a transcript is not the same as seeing the play in person.
Having tried Pligg for a while, I can tell you SPAM is a huge problem. Couple of weeks after the site went live, I started getting all these registrations from bots that I had to spend 30 minutes daily to clean that up... ultimately, I had to disable new user registrations, which kills the whole thing..

not sure about SlinkSet though...
I'm from the area that this concerns, and if anyone wants to know why the tree huggers are so upset check out google maps of the area:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

If you look all up and down I-70 and all throughout the region, you'll see tons and tons of dirt roads and big dirt rectangles. Each one of these is a natural gas well. This is a beautiful part of Colorado and Utah, and it's being completely devastated by the development. We call it a "National Sacrifice Area" in my family.
With Subversion WebDAV Autoversioning writes become commits.
How can a gorilla learn to fly? -Palm seems to have landed in a Pré.
You're right, not all "smart" bombs require GPS. I assumed that the IAF is using JDAM smart bombs, which use IMU & GPS integration. I don't see why one should use infrared or laser-guided bombs when one can use JDAMs.

The IDF could interfere with the C/A code indeed. Since Hamas seems to use obsolete equipment, I honestly don't see what tactical advantages would the IDF gain from jamming the civilian GPS signal.
A polygraph is not the same as law enforcement questioning you. You're taking it because you want a security clearance or you want to keep your parole.

You can be stubborn about it and lie and insist that they've got it wrong, but your reading will show that you're holding back on them. If they sense that you're trying to deceive them, they'll fail you.
Did he really type it all out? If it was printed on paper, why not OCR it?
Infographics Can Help You Spread Ideas and Attract Attention
An image is an act of communication. Images play an important role in the presentation of ideas. Worth more than a thousand words, they encapsulate meaning by both simplifying and embodying conceptual theories.
Please make the "discuss" / "N comments" anchor have a distinguishing property when :visited -- maybe a faint underline or weight change instead of a different color. Currently there's no way to see that I've looked at a story unless I visited the link.

It'd be nice to have the thread anchor target be larger, maybe by having each story encapsulated by something like this:

<a href="/item?=id=XXXXXX" class="story"> ... </a>

a.story { display:block; }
a.story:hover { text-decoration:none; background:#fff; }

That's probably incompatible with the WTF way you're using tables (TRs in flat series for the link, byline, and spacer) -- you'd have to switch to having each story be its own table. The result would be that the whole story's "row" (minus the anchors inside it) would be a link to the thread.
Viral Marketing: Is it the Flu or are we Infected?
Viral marketing, a colloquial name given to a subset of social media marketing, is growing like a wild weed. Traditional marketing giants like Unilever and Comcast, to name a few, are increasingly active in using the SMM tools to promote their brands
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

Also, who are we taking a loan from? China already owns most of America; now the Federal Reserve is just printing more money to make it look like the government can spend the money - but the reality is, it is just a redistribution of wealth from those who hold cash (middle class, and rich people can invest in other assets) to whoever the government mandates "needs" it. (The way they define needs, is if you are so bad at running your business it is on the verge of bankruptcy, so you need a ton of cash to go have a relaxing vacation costing millions.)
Fantastic game. Played it enough back in college to realize that the spawn points in multiplayer weren't random. That realization changed the dynamics of the game somewhat....

More on-topic, I think the title is wrong. People who can write well tend to be better at social organization. Mao was - among other things - a librarian and poet.
Oh, it's a blog entry about linux kernel development. :D
And by setting a precedent for bailing out bad businesses not only are the people who have to pay for this hurt, but everyone in the future because businesses will be encouraged to be corrupt rather than produce goods.

This is like in the prisoners dilemma, but you force the American people to not rat anyone out - so the corrupt businessman can get all the benefits at the cost of the American people.
You probably mean "window manager" instead of "OS", right?
You are right, I haven't read Nietszche state the precise idea that religion is based on scapegoating. Nietzsche does have the more general idea that religion is based on catharsis reached through violence and oppression. However, the root of violence is not mimetic for Nietzsche, but rather a common will to power that all have, but only some can act out externally.

At the same time, I can see the will to power idea working together with Girard's mimesis idea. The slaves want to be like the masters. This is the first form of mediation, the type that is beyond the reach of the desiree. When multiple slaves want to be like the masters, then you have the second form of mediation.

At that point, Nietzsche and Girard branch apart. Nietszche thinks the slaves reach catharsis through internalizing their will to power in the form of conscience and the ascetic ideal, while Girard thinks they reach catharsis through externalizing their desire for power on a common victim.

Yes, Girard thinks it is rivalry that leads to scapegoating, but if the original desire is power, then this neatly conflates the nature of the desire and the rivalry, since rivalry and the final scapegoating can also be considered the exercise of a will to power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School
Actually a repl might be just the thing in a spreadsheet.
True, but see my response to grusome where I explain how I see their ideas working together. My understanding of Girard's work is based on the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard#Mimetic_desire
Good advice. Fired? Then go get rich.
Krugman and other macroeconomists do not generally dispute those commonly-held microeconomic assumptions. Where they differ, and what the original article is referring to when he says "Keynes vs. Friedman", are in the macroeconomic models. Macro is tricky because 1) we cannot ethically run controlled experiments on the economy, and 2) there are way too many parameters one could include. Macro is a useful but very approximate science; no serious economist would tell you that these models are without flaws.
because the idf doesnt use commercial grade gps. so everyone else who might possibly, re hamas, should get blocked ;)

why would the idf want anyone else having positioning information in an active war zone?
I have the opposite problem. Ping pong is the official sport of Trovix, whereas I'm a foosball guy (doing a PhD where the staff room has a foosball table and a Mame machine will both make you awesome at foosball and Yie Ar Kung Fu)
Zen of Palm - The Path to Enlightenment
New rule of iconography: Never, ever use an icon of a guitar for anything that doesn't specifically have to do with the guitar. Guitar-fingering-tutorial app? OK, you can use the guitar icon. General music recording/composition/mixing/production app? NO GUITAR.
So your hatred of the resulting ugliness trumps others' private property rights, including mineral rights?
This guy just wasn't smart. If he were, he'd have created a company with an innocuous name like "NextWave" or something. Get some funding (apparently $45k) from environmentalists who don't want to see drilling. Then have NextWave bid on licenses, I mean land parcels that they couldn't pay for. Next, declare bankruptcy so that they didn't have to continue payments to the government. Hold onto the licenses, I mean land parcels until the government decides to settle rather than losing again in a bankruptcy case where someone didn't pay them. They wouldn't get to keep all the land, but they'd get to keep enough that it would be worth their while.

Plus, it's the business that's doing this action. Generally speaking, that means the business gets in trouble and not those running it. I'm no lawyer, but it seems like unless you pull an Enron, you don't seem to be individually held accountable.

This guy just wasn't smart: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/NextWave-FCC-Se...
Motif really, really does suck, though.
Learning to consistently (>25%) hit the very edge of the table, so that the ball drops almost straight to the floor, is so awesome.
Cobra: A Little JavaScript Class Library
One uses laser-guided bombs for improved accuracy. The USAF has embarked on an LJDAM program to combine the fair condition accuracy of laser with poor condition performance of IMU/GPS in to a single weapon system.
"Don't write code until you know what you're doing. Now, you may not be able to "know what you are doing" just from thinking, in which case you should start a TEST project and write a bunch of ugly code to make sure your ideas are correct.

Then, start again, in a new directory. We had seven or so different test project directories during the making of Delicious Library"

Wow! Must some inflexible language. In Python, Lisp and Javascript, (those are the ones I am 'happy' with) you can coax "test project" code into real and beautiful code. You can explore as you code.

Many other issues he mentions can be transcended simply by using a better programming language and a good helping of bottom-up programming.
So, You want to work for a startup?
Seriously, how often do you say to yourself, "I think I'll dive into this messy code today and try to make it nice and pretty without adding any functionality?"

Maybe I'm just weird, but I do that all the time.

Nobody is going to pay you for that.

Sure they will: refactoring and code cleanup is a commendable activity at plenty of competent software shops.
> The pay and shifts sucked, but at least it felt...natural. Work your shift, grab a brew, and go out with a few of the mates after the gig. Good times.

I had a friend who was a almost-stellar IT career, depending on how you define it.. Anyway, he was doing well by most measures. In his late 20's he quit to become a ski instructor and train to compete in cross country.

He had a great time, got to do some physical work -- however, the main thing was that it made no difference to his career.

I think if you said to a lot of people - take 2 years out, climb mountains, be a landscape gardener, whatever - they would think this would be career suicide. The thing is that's rarely the case, and from the evidence I've seen it's actually the opposite (i.e. people who come back are well regarded).

Pretty much anyone I talk to late in their career (60+) usually say they wished they'd taken 1, 2, 3+ years out to do other things.
You're not weird. Or at least you are no weirder than me.

I sometimes enjoy refactoring more than writing new code. Deleting code, in particular, is pretty much my favorite professional activity.
It's odd that the government wasn't just treated like a normal creditor. Usually in that situation, the party they owed the most to would end up owning all of the equity.
Yes, I agree with you on a lot of that, especially if you can write your entire app in Ruby. That hasn't been true for me though. Either I have to go to C for performance or there's some library that I want to use that's easier to use directly from C.

You'll probably want to switch to MacRuby. By this summer there should be lots of sample code.
Unacknowledged type-B procrastination? :-)

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
PageRank is a sparse mat and the eigenvalue can be obtained by multiply itself many times. But how to compute the general eigenvector in parallel? at least the eigenvector of symmetric matrix. It is very important when trying parallel PCA.
+1 I'm on your side too. A benefit of "cleaning house" is that it does not take as much planning/thought as actually creating new code so this allows me to turn up my favorite music, get into a nice groove, and have at it...now that's what I call a good Friday night!
A split view makes one more likely to comment and upvote/flag etc because it is right there, and no effort is necessary to navigate back to the article's HN page.
Let us know.
We hope to launch our first sponsored mission on the 19th. The sponsor will be a large online radio station and we'll be giving away a free ipod for top entry of a music-themed mission. If we gain interest from that, we'll continue with weekly, and potentially daily, give aways (even if they're smaller because they're more frequent).

We hadn't considered point values for different sponsorship though. I like it.

Thanks for the feedback
The High Security Risk Attached to Obama’s Belt
You know, it's possible to summarize nearly every article in a sentence or two -- but you miss out on all the flavor that way!
>> Then go get rich

Some employees are rich, just like some startup entrepreneurs are rich.

In my opinion, entrepreneurship has more to do with a desire to 'envision'. Entrepreneurship doesn't guarantee richness, but it does guarantee satisfaction from what you call 'work'.
Parcelization of fishing areas was used by Turkish fisherman of the Anatolian coast, with dramatic improvements in fishery productivity.
My experience installing OS X on a random machine is that wifi doesn't always work. But, installing it on a mac, it always works. The same thing can be said of installing linux on a random machine. But, installing linux on a mac, wifi always works.
Ron Graham was amazed that an elderly and seemingly frail Paul Erdos could easily beat him (may have been those damned amphetamines again!). So he (Graham) bought a ping pong serving machine, and eventually became the table tennis champion of Bell Labs (he's also an expert juggler and trampolinist). I think his wife Fan is also a killer player.
It may not have anything to do with fear of spying. Drug use is something that a) most people have done, and b) are least willing to admit to. While some of us may shy away from telling people of our sock fetish or whatever, admitting to drug use has real and far-reaching consequences.

So in other words, getting you to admit to drug use would likely be a reasonable representation that they have ascertained "the whole truth" from you.
I always thought that dropbox would be much better if I could tie it together with my S3 account and just have all the data saved there, to an unlimited amount paid by me.
I just learned that this sort of exists: http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/doc/sect-extending-python...

[ credit : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=430129 ]
> There are lots of times when the comment threads are more valuable/interesting than the links.

I find this is the case most of the time here. I enjoy reading engaging articles being 'hacked' apart.
"Hi, my name is Steve. I come from a rough area. I used to be addicted to crack, but now I am off, trying to stay clean. That is why I'm selling magazine subscriptions..."
Ask HN: Organizing Paperwork
Any good guides for organizing/keeping records? I have a small startup organized as a C corp.
Is 3 Percent Of People The Same As 3 Percent Of Ideas?
Hmm this is tough. Ugly or less domestic oil production...

Thing is, if we drill more, gas prices are affected (in a good way for us). If we don't drill, we will NEVER tap the potential of our resources (and it's there). And if we do drill, the land will look disgusting, which is definitely bad. Especially such beautiful land in the west...

But since I'm not living there I am inclined to be okay with the land looking ugly, since I'm not the one who has to live with it. It's the same deal with windmills -- everyone wants to build them but nobody wants to look at them. I guess I care more about my gas prices. Is that a bad thing?

Hm and can we stick to hacking? I mean it was an interesting article but man I'm depressed now. Haha.
Now it's showing 50 points for the (parent) article and 50 comments posted... this is very strange.
>As an example, take the health care debate. Compared to some european countries with good healthcare systems, the US spends substantially more (~15% vs ~9% of GDP) covers substantially fewer people (the millions without coverage) and the overall health of the population is poorer. By nearly all objective measures, a good public system is much better than an all-private system and yet, we know this is not compatible with libertarian ideology - you will have to search far and wide to find a libertarian group that supports a public healthcare system.

I haven't been feeling my best lately.[1] I apologize for not supporting my argument, but I believe Chile has a reasonably good healthcare system, where the rich go to the private system and the rest go to the public system.

[1] I just moved to the US from Chile.
You could sell numbered prizes to the winners, like t-shirts and other marked swag announcing how great the winner did.

You might link the cost to the buyers position in the winner's list. I know one t-shirt company sells limited edition t shirts and charges a dollar per edition number (e.g. $20 for #20, $1 for #1).
As others have written, some of the things I've longed for in Excel are found in Numbers -- they're also available in Ragtime: the ability to place multiple spreadsheets independently in a single document and work on full ranges within them. Ragtime adds rotation of spreadsheet objects.

I prefer lightweight databases to spreadsheets, so my suggestions would be similar to what FileMaker says: http://www.filemaker.com/articles/database/new_database.html

In short: make it easy to present a set of information through different views, make it easy to share between users, make it easy to create and maintain complex data structures and validation. Presenting information from the spreadsheet through the web, with or without edit capability, would be good.
So, essentially, the author who I assume is a Java programmer doesn't get Prototypal inheritance and wishes to make Javascript into Java.

It's vaguely interesting looking at how he did it, the actual output itself, not so much. You'd be better off reading Doug's Javascript the Good Parts than trying to remake your Javascript into something it's not.
The newer excels have much much much better graphic capabilities
Using a shell company wouldn't have helped him. What he committed was an act of fraud -- bidding on licenses which he knew he couldn't pay for -- and fraud can pierce the corporate veil. There is extensive legal precedent that a corporation created for the purpose of carrying out a fraud does not provide any protection to the individual(s) behind it.

(This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer if you plan on committing acts of fraud.)
Linking to a Wikipedia article does not in any way answer my question.

You've presented a possible reason why borrowing money to bail out corporations could be harmful, but you haven't demonstrated that it's worse than the alternative. Sure, bailouts are bad. So are depressions.
>In general, though, it is a rare organism in a rare environment whose reproductively optimal strategy is to rest with a smile on its face, feeling happy.

Resting is the optimal strategy for about 8 hours per day.

Anyway, I've thought of this happiness treadmill too. My solution is to avoid increasing neurons exponentially; rather, they get reset with nanotech or something.
I don't even know Java beyond some of the concepts.

If you look at the code, it uses prototypical inheritance. The whole thing is very lightweight, under 200 lines of code.

I do love "JavaScript the Good Parts", but I do have some issues with the syntactic inconsistencies that exist in JS, good parts or not.
I am re-learning the piano.
Hack up a real life vigilante
An Anthology of Various Quotes
ART is very different - it couples movement with massage to mechanically stretch out the muscle. It's usually far more effective.
Disclaimer: not particularly a power user. Problem also probably more of a UI/UX issue than a technical issue.

From time to time when I'm working in excel I'll find I've derived an answer from a couple adjacent input cells and several intermediate calculation step cells below. As a contrived example, lets say I have pennies per number of hours and I want to convert to dollars per year. I'll start with hours per year (365.25*24) and divide that by the input "number of hours". Then I'll divide the input "number of pennies" by 100 to get dollars. Then I'll multiply the two together to get my output.

Without fail after working through a problem like this I will want to make a 2-D grid with an input variable on each axis and have the results filled into the grid. Unfortunately because I just did it using a bunch of intermediate cells I can't copy and paste, drag and fill, or any of the other intuitive mechanisms. To date the only solution I've found to this problem is to re-do all of my work in VBA as a single function and use =myFn(colval,rowval) in each cell.

There are a couple ways this could play out. One of which would be to call subordinate sheets (or chunks of sheets) as functions. This is how I've envisioned it in my head. It would be a terrible pain to make that work, and I'd be afraid it would confuse people who wouldn't understand which cells worked normally and which cells were function components.

Another solution would be to select an output cell and have it refactor it to a function that could be called. This is probably a lot easier to do, but might not be as maintainable by the kinds of people that don't understand VBA -- they could keep the "source code" cells around and recompile when changes are made, but all of the standard code generator / manual edit problems apply.
I usually check to see how many comments there and if there are quite a few I can count on you guys to have a good discussion going and I can't help but check what's going on.
Amen to the end of one-big-sheet. Apple seems to have addressed that: http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/

(I don't know if their version is any good)
Great question.
I usually visit the link first then come back to the comments on Hacker News.
It’s like enjoying more seeing a movie you don’t know anything about than reading critics first.

Reading the comments on hackerNews is the main reason I do not activate comments on my website.
For me if a discussion needs to happen, it should be where the people found the link.
So if you post your link on reddit, HackerNews, Digg, etc. you end up having focused discussions. Each one having a much better quality than mixing every point of view in one place (the comment thread of the website).

Have good day.
Thibault
We're Borrowing Like Mad. Can the U.S. Pay It Back?
Significant Cybersecurity Weaknesses at IRS
Facebook, Meet the Locals