skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally, for instance as a drummer and a programmer I find myself comparing "drum patterns" and riffs as procedures, but particularly with drum patterns they can be re-used across bands/styles and songs even within the same record! So being a drummer is definitely about code re-use and modular design. I could go off on my project to generate recursive music (live) but thats a whole other world. I would like to think that I drum with s-expressions.
Yeah, exactly. The help command should also have a dozen useless esoteric options but no obvious way to actually get any help. Here are some suggestions :)

-B Don't not use non-buffered IO for not displaying output
-e Pipe help output through rot13 transformation
-G Display output in psychedelic ANSI format
-w Produce ASCII histogram of help task heap allocations.
-Z Format output so that the number of columns is a prime number
-Q Run help in daemon mode
-X1 Translate help to Klingon
-X2 Translate help to Esperanto
-X12 Translate help to Esperanto, then to Klingon
-X21 Translate help to Klingon, then to Esperanto
Things we hate about the iPhone
FYI, this is how you do a user-interface rant/parody : http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html
that made me laugh more than the article itself
Microsoft to miss profit target,  cut jobs
I think the author is advocating Wisdom of Crowds.
The Obama Effect: Google Says President Changed Search Activity
Scott McNealy: "open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software"
But it did fail. For those 21 million people, the video stopped or it kicked them out or there were audio problems.

I am not sure why the article plugged some obscure video streaming software. CNN.com already does peer to peer video transferring via a flash plugin that it forces you to download.
I've been using Jing for a while now.

http://jingproject.com
Apparently this is not the first time:

i-LIMB bionic hand approaches 100 fittings
http://www.gizmag.com/i-limb-bionic-hand/8733/
That sure is some ugly JS and (insecure) PHP scripting. But hey, what do you expect from a website called 'css-tricks'.
The greatest anomalies are in the most unpopulated areas?
The author qualified this list as designs he has used for himself in enterprise software. I don't believe that he was suggesting that these were a list Set In Stone.
The "holy shit" feature of that app can be it grabbing the weather where you are and automatically filling in pressure/wind direction/etc, but I don't know if they coded that in. But I guess if you're a sniper, you wouldn't want your location be broadcasted out via GSM.
See my comments on using .f4v instead of .mp4 here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443542

NB: This comment was made after this thread went dormant. This cross-post is for the benefit of anyone browsing the archives..
My first job was in a small software company where all programmers worked part-time. Their interests outside the job were varied widely. One wrote software for chimney sweepers, another published a chess fanzine, there was a coach of an athletics team and I make comics. But yes, there also was one musician.
Fall behind in what sense? Obviously, if the multimedia content isn't transcribed quickly enough, then that makes sense, but I would also guess less consequential than if a given page weren't transformed from 'marked up' to 'text', but in the latter case, if the backend is dynamic, and just changing the output format, why would it fall behind?
now that its confirmed that downvoting works, maybe you should try upvoting like OP and check
Win 5% Startup Ownership by making a Kick-ass Design
Configuration items are not hard coded ... they are stored in configuration files (e.g. app.config, settings.ini, app.xml etc.)
A setup for screencast definitely goes beyond a screen capture utility. You need a way of capturing and displaying keystrokes without interfering with the application you are trying to demo. Does anyone have any recommendations? What about adding text to the video at certain locations, like annotations?

edit: What about video sharing services, which ones are good at rendering text? I know that youtube does a poor job, but what other services are better?
I think it is consistent with the theme of stimulating the economy. Your not going to stim it by using all free stuff regardless of the merits.
Novelty script. Now I know you can make slanted borders though.
Over at the peepcode, they have a nice video for explaining this: http://peepcode.com/products/screencasting-on-the-mac. Not free, but very good.
It's just a matter of finding something you love to do and it won't feel like a chore.

In college, I was in a 1 credit small jazz combo that met every Friday from 3-4. After the instructor left at 4, we'd whip out songs we wrote and would start jamming. Often it was 7 before I looked at the time.

I read an interview with a famous Chen Tai Chi stylist a few years ago. He recalled practicing 12 hours daily for a few years in his youth. He didn't talk about it like work, he just got a thrill out of every moment.
Controlling the nature of graphene
Secure web uploads (getting around insecurities in IE)
Crazy Egg does a pretty good job at this http://crazyegg.com/
Is the only general solution to this problem: 'more edge servers'?

Or is there another technology that could be really helpful for this type of event?
In this case however the building and maintenance of the infrastructure was and is heavily subsidized by Canadian taxpayers. As well the monopolies are not the sole private contributers.
http://freescreencast.com

disclaimer: I made it.

But seriously, I do use it constantly.
Toyota Beats GM in 2008, Now #1 Carmaker by Sales Volume
Disagree strongly, not with the main point, but with the argument that innovation isn't in serious danger.

So why am I optimistic about investing in 2009? Because entrepreneurship is an addiction, it isn't a choice. Great entrepreneurs aren't driven to create companies because it is easy, or because capital is plentiful, or because the public markets are swallowing anything the venture community will throw at them. Great entrepreneurs start companies because they can't help themselves.

If the entrepreneurs can't get funding or customers, they won't be able to start companies, so they'll go off and do other things. More than drive is needed; they also need to eat and make rent.

It is possible to squash the entrepreneurial spirit of a people, as observed in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

While the resources an entrepreneur may be able to bring to bear on a problem may vary with the economic climate, the desire -- the need -- to innovate never goes away. And Venture Capital is the fuel of that innovation.

There's also a need for safe, reliable drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa. That doesn't mean that it's always there. It does not follow from something being necessary or desirable that it can be counted upon to be there.
It happens. Other articles might entertain/satisfy you more, but I'm well aware of the internet's One Strike You're Out rule.
I haven't seen anything that says all 21 million people had problems. All I see is another sensationalistic headline from TechCrunch.

There is a plug at the end because that's how blogs make money; by selling links and paid mentions.
Virtual worlds raised $594 million in 2008
Sounds like a fun little project!
"Verdict: today is an interesting meatspace reminder to check your edge cases."

Actually, it's also a reminder that, like plentyoffish, a working system can ignore edge cases and be incredibly successful for unrelated reasons, and only a few people will complain about the failure at the edge. :)
is it reasonable to flag things for being unfunny?
Interesting idea.

5% of any company is a huge chunk, especially for just a few hours of work! (In one company I founded, I only held 10%.)

If you win and these guys exit, you stand to make a few dollars.
How To Make Your Own Website
So you have a killer idea huh? Whether you want to make a blog about your cat, a useful resource on fixing shoes or star wars fan fiction you can easily and cheaply make your own website. By cheaply I mean less than fifty bucks per year. Follow these simple steps and you’ll have your very own slice of the internet in no time.
Is this a $100 Google phone?
What Do Bill Gates And Karch Kiraly Have In Common? They Go Both Ways
Probably a combination of things.

1. The newspaper industry is just doing really poorly which means there is little money to be had there. So, this program, not greatly connected to Google's main business, also probably wouldn't make a lot of money.

2. Traditional ads (TV/newspaper) differ from web ads. With the web, you're trying to automatically place ads for an infinite variety of content and users. With traditional ads, you're placing one ad for every user and there's a finite amount of content. So, all of Google's techniques for web advertising have little to do with traditional ads.

3. What kind of research can you do? Like, with web ads, people can look at impression to click ratio of the ad placed next to many different content; impression to click of 100 variations of the ad; click to sale based on all those conditions. Traditional ads you really only get circumstantial evidence (ie. we ran 100 ads this week and sales went up 5%, therefore 100 ads raises sales 5% - which, clearly isn't good evidence since that change could have been caused by any number of things). Sure, sometimes they say, go to dell.com/tv-offer-8, but how many people do that rather than going to dell.com?

Google's success is having computers do the work for them. They measure things analytically and mine data. Unfortunately, the traditional market isn't based on data. Rather, it's based on intuition - this ad makes our product look cool. Sometimes they back the intuition with quasi-data like focus groups, but that's not a Google thing. Google mines hard quantitative data, they don't intuit, they don't do qualitative data. I'm not saying that the others are worse, just that it isn't Google's realm and therefore it just doesn't fit Google in the way that web ads do.

Google is great at a few very important things. They don't have great ideas on how to revolutionize everything. If there isn't a lot of data to analyze or something that needs a ton of computing power, Google's unlikely to have a great solution to your problem.
I thought ants, but yeah, crazy.
"Mode 2" Knowledge Production
> edit: What about video sharing services, which ones are good at rendering text? I know that youtube does a poor job, but what other services are better?

I decided that I didn't want the hassle of not knowing how a 3rd party video streaming service (e.g. YouTube) might alter the quality. So I use FlowPlayer (an OS flash video player) and hosted the video file (.f4v) and the flash .swf on my webserver. It works fine, so long as you have BW..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
In that specific case, I was. It was very strange... I mean, there were about three or four business plans, each of which centred on the Internet. When I finally left for a contract at double the money, the boss held another secret meeting where he told everyone not to talk to me for the duration of my notice, because I had been "disloyal". One of the office monkeys habitually referred to me as "Spacker" after that. Looking back, I have a headache ;)
"Went ahead and added NYC as a city."

So I was going to add some restaurants, but when I selected NYC, then clicked on "Create a free account", I got a 500 page that said:

"Please contact the server administrator, [no address given] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error."
Writing Decisions: Saving space without losing meaning
Steve Jobs's departure from Apple doesn't spell doom for the company
> According to the American Egg Board, that is not true

Did you actually read the whole bit there? They are talking about large commercial egg operations (which is the sort of "free range" eggs I said were merely overpriced gimmicks.) A pasture-raised chicken appears to produce better eggs according to tests referenced here: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Real-Food/2007-10-01/Tests-Re... or you could examine the facts at nutritiondata (compare http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c200_S0000o180j0... to http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/11...)

There is a difference, it is quantifiable, and the claims made by the commercial egg producers is both incorrect and deceptive (big surprise there...)
This is going to go over really well in due diligence.

Edit: This might make more sense if you created a special class of stock without voting rights. If you're essentially giving away 5% of a potential exit someday that's one thing. Giving away 5% of control is another.
Rule 1 of the Internet: If it's described as "Hilarious", it isn't.
I don't get why this is getting good reviews. How is it different from the already-established sites? Even google does it itself on google maps.
I think that the problem is we consider a result as either "positive" or "negative". All correctly preformed experiments add a positive ammount of knowledge. Humans tend to classify unexpected results as negative, but that is not necessary.
you think so? can you explain more? I am not looking at the theory of it, rather interested in working models where multicast is being used to deliver online content.
Actually, the way you read it almost exactly contradicts most of the reported reasons that the engineers who left did so. It seems far more likely and believable that you'r exactly wrong -- and that the engineers who are leaving google are leaving BECAUSE they like working on algorithms and solving scaling problems, and aren't able to get opportunities to do that at google.
> You're misunderstanding me. The link between benefits and utilization is that in order to gain future benefits you spend a certain amount on capital goods

I'm not misunderstanding you at all. I'm pointing out that your terminology is non-standard and inconsistent.

There is no link between benefits and utilization. Utilization only affects costs.

> Now, you say the connection between utilization and costs is not always strong. No, it's not always strong,

The original claim was that low utilization was always unsustainable. Conceding that the relationship between utilization and costs is not always strong is an admission that said claim was wrong. It is strong in some circumstances but not others.

The specific example was mostly idle computers, the claim being that having an idle computer is unsustainable.

> Paying only for the resources you actually use increases flexibility and reduces costs.

Not always. Consider my home PC. I could have gotten one less powerful for somewhat less money. The less powerful one would suit my needs much of the time. Moreover, said computer is idle much of the time. However, the costs of trying to optimize for utilization are significantly higher than the costs of just having a reasonable computer, even though the utilization is low.

The problem with the "actually use" argument is that there are costs associated with flexibility. That's why I mentioned 400MB of ram. (Which reminds me - that use of "flexibility" is somewhat idiocynratic. Having 1GB of ram is more flexible than having 200mb and going out and renting 800mb on demand.)

However, that's just me. So, let's find out if you're any different. Do you own any devices that are significantly underutilized? Why?
Residential hydrogen fuel cells to be sold in Japan
You've got 2 major risks here.

Your question indicates you're concerned about someone using a bogus card, using your site, and then you're out the money/fees (this is indistinguishable from a chargeback due to an unhappy customer). As far as I can tell, this is a "cost of doing business" and other than some common sense rules (don't accept business from Nigerians, East Europeans, or whoever is the "land of hackers" this week - check the address and IP addresses - log everything), I don't think anyone will be able to assist you (including law enforcement, who has a hard time getting involved for less than 6-digits of losses). One of the applications I'm responsible for accepts/processes credit cards, and we have 0 chargebacks, but that's mainly because this application is a add-on for a desktop application that costs several hundred dollars.

The other one you didn't seem to address is PCI-DSS compliance. If you store the credit card number in any place (including log files), you (and your customers) could be in for a world of hurt if you're hacked (like TJ Maxx did).
https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/index.shtml (see chart on page 4 of the spec, and the checklists at the end may be helpful as well).
The problem then is that humans don't know how to use definitions. In a specific study, a result can be negative, but in the general view, it would be positive because it contributes to the body of science.
P2P, like Joost, but then live.
I assumed you were choosing location based on IP, but I guess I'm just lucky to live in North Austin.

It wasn't clear to me what I could do once I created an account until I read deep into the site; some text on the homepage like "Create an account to add restaurants and ratings" would help.

I'll definitely start using this, good work!
Conversely, 5% of nothing is nothing. :-)

This is a great idea though overall. For one, it's an easy way to get a good design for "free" for the owner. From an up and coming designer's POV though, it's a great resume/portfolio addition that could actually have a payoff in future years.

Me, myself and I take note.
Apple Q1 2009 Predictions
I tried to distinguish by adding good tag and filtering capabilities, eg. looking for a place that serves asian food that takes less than 10 minutes.
An Introduction To Transistors
The Best Twitter Brands and the People behind them
i used Windows Media Encoder 9, converted it to wmv and then used ffmpeg to create an flv.
SIRIUSly expensive: Satellite radio rates to go up
Boot Beep: The Story and Source Code of the Mac's Boot Chime
Microsoft’s money backs an IBM adversary - again
Ask HN: How do you handle debates with non-scientists?
I find myself getting into arguments with non-scientists and coming out of them satisfied that I've argued my case well and fairly, only to find my friends subsequently insisting that I've been "aggressive" or "rude". It bothers me, because I'm convinced that I argue in a fair- and open-minded way; it's not my fault if they're not well-informed or wrong!
If they did, they'd have to be pretty seriously deluded. Atlas Shrugged I can see as #1 popular - there was the poll that said it was second only to the Bible for average Americans - but Hubbard's stuff is incredibly derided. I don't know anybody who's read a single book of his.

I'm sure they released a result more to gain popularity through controversy than they did to get a truly accurate reading. And it worked, since theirs is always the one I've heard named when people discuss "great books," and it always gets people angry.
Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers
I don't see the post claiming Erlang is the most efficient language out there. So I'm guessing you're just being a jerk here.

But there are several definitions of efficiency in programming. Sure, it won't perform as well as a good optimizing C compiler. But Erlang does have pretty good performance, and it has great support for distributed processing. Using Erlang/OTP means you don't have to hack your way through distributed stuff, probably getting it wrong. It also has good support for upgrading code on the fly without taking down the system. In those ways, Erlang could be said to be more efficient than C.
Apple Disclosures About Jobs Said to Face SEC Review
it's not my fault if they're not well-informed or wrong!

Maybe it is you?
Apple's Podcast Capture is a potential option here.

It's part of Mac OS X client, and connects with Podcast Producer running on Mac OS X Server.

Which means it's either free or (if you don't have a Mac OS X Server box around) it's not free.
Long hair and beards?
This is actually brilliant. Is wrapping a web rendering engine and exporting the web page as a PSD file the next step?
First of all, the title is misleading. Negative results are not the same thing as unfavorable results. Second, as a person involved in biomedical research, I am very familiar with the bias toward publishing positive results, and leaving the negative results buried in a lab notebook somewhere. There are two root causes for this:

1. Funding agencies reward positive results. Of course, the biggest funding agency in the U.S. is the U.S. gov't. The gov't must answer to the people, and the people only want to hear about positive results. Show some interest or at least concern for negative findings (and learn, or teach kids in school, why negative findings are important), and you'll find more scientists publishing negative findings.

2. Funding, especially in the U.S., is a competition. Why would you tell your competitors all the things that didn't work? Why give them that strategic advantage? Would you expect Google to tell Yahoo which search algorithms don't work? Reward scientists based on consistent good work, and not based on their ability to beat out competitors, and you'll find more scientists publishing negative findings.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071221_0036...
Exactly, I also feel so and have written a blog on it http://barakbangla.com/index.php/Is-it-good-time-for-entrepr...
I can't trust this article. If they had done this study and found unfavorable results are just as likely to be published, their study would be much more boring, and it would not have been published. ;-)
OK - now zip should function as a postcode as well. (characters permitted, up to length 10)
According to wikipedia, it apparently emits methoxy phenols http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignin#Pyrolysis
A fatal problem with the "games as art" conversation
That's weird - are you still seeing this?