skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1: it's a constant feeling of being gamed. I'll avoid retailers, say, that insist on "loyalty cards", I mean, data tracking cards (or just push them hard) on this basis. I once played the game with register discount coupons -- buy an item, and get a "buy 3 get 1 free" coupon. The next time it was "buy 5" (or some n > 3) get 1 free. The challenge kept escalating (I played 3 rounds).

My take-away: this company was playing psychological mind games with me, was tracking my purchase decision (via UUIDs on the coupons, despite my paying with cash and not using a data tracking card.

2: The products offered at such discounts are generally higher price and offer little if any utility, or just plain crap (e.g.: processed foods you're better off not eating). You're better off buying store-brand, generic, or raw produce.

Decision: shop somewhere that doesn't play mindfuck with you, and/or is conveniently located (time + travel expense + product wastage are significant procurement expenses), and offers a consistent fair price. Extending extreme effort to shave a fraction of a percent off price (or spending several pounds to save several pence) really doesn't pay.
If you find the right mix of David Bowie's Space Oddity (one with hard panning), playing one channel makes it sound like THE worst garageband Bowie cover ever.

The high hat is high on the mix, you can barely hear the orchestra, and only one of Bowie's audio tracks is on it, so it is really discordant.

It makes my skin crawl, but I love it.
I think all of these points are valid, but I'd like to add another: being technical substantially increases your credibility among potential employees, VCs, and fellow entrepreneurs. Even if you're not planning to be the back-end systems guy or the rock-star designer once your company scales (and chances are, if you're a founder, you won't be), having coding competency helps you make those hires more easily and will win the respect of your more technical employees. VCs also love it when you're the one who has built the first few prototypes of your site and haven't simply outsourced the work to others.
Dear Andy
,
After the many years of Paypal receiving stories just like yours I'm forced to take action. The traditional Paypal long term strategy of "Hahaha, where else are you going to go for online payments?" is not a viable option anymore.

It's unfortunate that your story has spread so far and so quickly. I now have to figure out how to resolve this AND try to figure out how anyone let it get this bad. Changing such entreched culture here is going to be hard.

I'm going to do my best of not letting Paypal become more of a cliche of how big businesses get their foundations kicked out from under them by smaller, scarappy startups.

P.S. Please,please, please don't google Stripe.
The problem is that the way the game is rigged, you can't decide only once. You've got to consciously compare every time you shop.

The cognitive weight of that decision making is higher than a consistent and satisficing heuristic (shop somewhere that doesn' tplay mindfuck with prices and prices fairly).
This only works in a few specific cases that can get the massive numbers to donate (it's really just a numbers game).

In most cases, your game will be pirated and you won't make that much money. If you actually were able to sell something, you might be able to make enough to survive, which is a win-win for everyone.

If you truly want to battle piracy, make games that allow you to purchase in-game additions to help you along in the game. Fruit Ninja and Farmville both do this.

Donations have historically been a bad way to run a business. I'm not sure why people keep making the same mistakes in thinking that it's a good business model.
Its not just firefighters, but people who live in shared buildings -- apartment, condominium, co-op, etc. In which case, it would appear evident to me that the real policy issue is one of allowing smoking indoors.

Unfortunately the bureaucratic process tends to lean towards spending enormous amounts of time and resources on issues that could be "hacked" fairly easily.

When we add a lot of variables to a problem we end up with solutions that not only are challenging to rationalize, but also tend to have ugly side effects. This is something I've learned from running my own business, and it seems to be reflected on a government level as well.
Funny Halloween Costumes Pop Culture Favorites (INFOGRAPHIC)
Funny Halloween Costumes Pop Culture Favorites (INFOGRAPHIC)
The Future of Televisions
This last winter, we had a nasty ice-storm that coated everything in about a 1/8 to 1/4 coat of ice. I was working in a nearby city, so going home was nigh impossible.

I ended up staying with a friend. She has a roommate, and they both smoke. I ended up sleeping on a bed there. What I saw disturbed me greatly:

The pillow, sheet, and 2 blankets all had various amounts of burns from ashes and cigarettes. The sizes on some of the burns were so big I could fit my index finger through.

I have to wonder: how do they keep from catching their surroundings on fire?
You mean by having a guy to ask where to find something because you're lost in the store and can't find shit?
Hello Mr. David,

We all want your mobile number. I have a 1000 angry friends who want to personally talk to you.

Thanks
> Auditing is not permitted and the class size will not be augmented to accommodate those wait-listed.

This is too bad, it would have been nice to drop in on a lecture
A single email does not change a process nor a corporate culture of indifference.
The link is slightly wrong: it's missing the l at the end.
A Bayesian statistics primer
Why do you care about this? When you listen to the album, you obviously want to hear every song on the album, and hard drives now are so big (and this occurence rare enough) that the extra space can hardly matter. So why do you care?
I agree that this launch was mishandled. When I watched the announcement, I was excited by the phone and considering switching to Windows Phone 8. I went searching for a launch date and more hardware specs about the phone, but I couldn't find anything. Then we found out that the video was faked, then the photos were faked. All of this together has made me classify this phone as vaporware in my mind. Why hold a product launch event if you aren't able to launch?!
OSHA and EPA have overlapping missions on chemical toxicity, don't they?
Totally agree. And make another blog post to state that PayPal has 6 months to shape up or you're done for good
All I can say is good luck with that!
> smoking out in your backyard or tripping in your living room really doesn't matter to the public, storing copies of songs and sharing doesn't hurt anyone, and parking the wrong direction on a street doesn't usually cause any real issues--yet we are to assume that the government is looking out for the public good by interfering with these activities?

Maybe you think that, but the majority of US voters support people who don't. In fact, they are so sure it's a bad thing that they support governments who want it outlawed.

Maybe it's just conservatism - current voters might be ambivalent enough on the issue that they'd rather the government just doesn't do anything (if it aint broke, don't fix it).

Whatever the case, the government has the backing of the majority of voters, which is a pretty good system overall. Is there a better system of government you had in mind?
This sounds like exactly the kind of problem that relational databases were designed to solve. You can organize it with an entity-relationship model fairly easily. Once you have stored your information in a database, the filename doesn't really matter as long as each mp3, ogg, etc. gets a unique name; you can look up the file by querying the database for files that have the properties you care about.
For what it's worth, Spain's Royal Language Academy has called the language "español" since 1923, and 89% of Spaniards reported being fluent in it in 2005. So saying Spaniards don't speak Spanish is like saying Americans don't speak English.
Some unsolicited advice.

"app-UI is a free & open source collection of reusable "application container" user interface components that may be helpful to web and mobile developers for creating interactive applications using HTML and JavaScript, especially those targeting mobile devices."

That's one loooooong sentence to start off your page with. Further, it seems like you're scared of diving into the mobile "niche." Embrace the niche. Try this, maybe?

"app-UI: Native-looking mobile application containers for HTML and JavaScript."
Are you in the states? How did you order it? I could only find a link for finding dealers in Europe.
No, there is a whole field that deals with issues like this. It's called library science. Specifically, dealing with this problem is called [authority control](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority_control).

Some of the other problems are also solved by cataloging experts.
Like I said, that's fine if you’re only writing code. It doesn't stand up so well if you need to read code also. The author of the code could use any feature the language provides.
These things also are not supposed to be used covered by a bulb or upside down. (link I found the quickest http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/when-you-shoudnt-use-cfl-bul... )

I've seen local ordinances that in effect mandate the incorrect usage of CFLs. As such, a fixture at my mom's house results in a burned out (due to overheating) CFL about once every 6 months.
That's not what I got from that abstract. Rather, broccoli has little cancer-preventative effect on fruit flies.
I am not sure on that point this reality didn't affect the area I was working on. What I do know is that the number of fires has severely decreased (nearly halved just in the last 5 years). If the number of fires, the ammount claimed per fire has increased dramatically, part of that is the price of building material, work hours and just the value of the insured assets. But it doesn't seem that having fire retardant makes fires any smaller.
They don't just want to stop spending money on it. It seems like Twitter wants people to stop using desktop apps to access Twitter.
Love is free to play
Just Exec.
I think he's entitled to be in that company. Rails was a big leap forward.

I think the original blogger showed great taste with his choice of interview subjects.
I suspect no PR involved here - that email is repetitive, not polished, and feels like a new CEO trying to do the right thing and light a fire.
JDistiller, A DSL for web-crawling built on Node.js and jQuery
A couple weeks ago I posted a web-crawler I'd built for parsing Wikipedia articles (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436349). jDistiller grew out of this project. As a test I rebuilt the crawler in thirty lines of code using the jDistiller API:

new jDistiller()
.set('title', '#firstHeading')
.set('links', '#bodyContent p a', function(element, prev) {
var href = element.attr('href'),
key = href.replace('/wiki/', '');

if ( key === href) return;

element.replaceWith('[[' + key + ']]');

return [key, {
title: element.attr('title'),
text: prev[key] ? prev[key].text : element.text(),
occurrences: prev[key] ? prev[key].occurrences + 1 : 1
}]
})
.set('sections', '#bodyContent p,#firstHeading,h2,h3,img', function(element, prev) {
var images = [];

if ( element.is('h1') || element.is('h2') ) {
this.heading = element.text().trim();
return
}

return [this.heading, {
text: prev[this.heading] ? prev[this.heading].text + element.text() : element.text(),
images: element.is('img') && element.attr('width') > 50 ? [element.attr('src').replace('//', 'http://')] : []
}];
})
.distill('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog', function(err, distilledPage) {
console.log(JSON.stringify(distilledPage.sections));
});
I had to open up a new tab, to come back to hackernews because I didnt want the song to stop.
This is the shitty python script I use to organize music, which seems to work pretty well except in one case[1]: https://gist.github.com/3681165.

For the love of god, try it on a small sample of your music or it will wreak all kinds of havoc and you will yell and curse my name.

What it does: takes a directory of folders with MP3s, and makes them into the a directory of folders like yourdir/[ARTIST]/[ALBUM]/[TRACK No.] - [Track name].mp3. More importantly though, I believe it handles unicode correctly, and it's just over 100 lines of code, so you could adapt it to whatever system you prefer.

Find the python library called Mutagen that deals with parsing ID3 tags and put it in the same directory as this horrible script.

[1]: The one case it handles spectacularly poorly is when you have an album with multiple artists. This could be a soundtrack, a compilation, or even that thing that happens especially often in rap where the artist is like "[Some dude] ft. [Some other dude]". Honestly, I just handle those cases manually, but it might not be that hard to make the script do it right.

By the way, I've really only run this script on Windows. There are undoubtedly some tweaks that should be made to make it work correctly on Unix-y systems.
I only go so far as sanitizing and standardizing my music collection through Tag&Rename (and I haven't found a good OSX equivalent to this yet sadly). It gets the data from Amazon in 98% of cases, adds the album art (which I like having on my player), etc. Then I store the files in:

Artist/Album/Track# - Song name [- Artist name]

The last is only there for soundtracks and other "Various Artists" type collections.

This is Good Enough [tm] for me. I can sync this across hard drives (backup), minimize duplicates (although I end up with these through compilations of various sorts), etc.

Unfortunately the ID3 tag system is All Wrong [tm] for this in many ways stated (in this post and elsewhere). For example:

- Albums don't really have an artist; songs do;

- Programs for automating this that get info from Amazon and elsewhere tend to use what year the particular CD was released rather than when it was originally released, which is far more useful and relevant (eg if you want the Beatles White album you don't care the CD was released in 1998, it should come up under 1968;

- Albums don't really have years either. Or at least they have publication years. The songs have years. Normal studio albums have a common year. Compilations and soundtracks do not;

- Genres are coarse-grained, arbitrary and (IMHO) mostly useless;

- What I like is greatly influenced by the circumstances around the song, sometimes more than the song itself. I might like a song because it reminds me of a particular person, place or event. Or even mood. Sometimes its the lyrics. Sometimes its the sound. No recommendation engine is going to capture this sort of angle.

This goes beyond music: people just aren't interested in classifying, well, pretty much anything. Playlists seem to be about as far as most people are willing to go. Playlists are a fairly convenient way of coming up with s event-specific music eg for working out, for relaxing, for dancing, for a party, etc.

Efforts at far strong and more accurate metadata, classification and organization speak more about one's festidious--even anal-retentiveness--more than any real need or better outcome (IMHO). It's just rabbit-holing really.
Why the tone? I don't use them. I tried. I gave my opinion, asked some questions, and my opinions were there to give context as to why I'm asking the questions.

I know we're used to seeing everyone spout off their opinions as if their opinions were facts but what I said was clearly an innocent opinion.

What's with everyone being on edge here? Why does everyone want to pick a fight or be the guy that tells everyone else why they're wrong? Sheesh, everyone complaining about HN going downhill is right (now that is an opinion said as if it were fact).

In any case, I'm actually really interested in the comment about spite Gruber makes at the end. Can anyone answer that?
The difference is lobbying is soft influence, meaning if the politician's constituents care about an issue, lobbying and donations won't buy policy. What they do buy is sway in cases where the electorate isn't paying attention (essentially establishing a default position on an issue).
In other words, the decision process for a politician goes something like:

1. Do voters in my district care[1]/will they notice?

2. What will best attract continued campaign funding?

3. What is best for my district?

4. What is best for the country?

[1] The key here is whether voters care enough about an issue for it to influence the representative's reelection. If not, they can move on to step two.

Voters do come first if they care enough/make enough noise (e.g., the SOPA protests). The problem is it's impossible for voters to pay attention to every issue and coordinate their voices; that's why we have a republic in the first place.
BitcoinPlus: montize your websites' visitors by mining bitcoins
As making music has been a dream of mine for most of my life, and I had no actual barometer of skill besides personal preference, you bet your ass that it was terrifying.

People like you are why I actively avoid comment threads on Hacker News.
Leadership lessons I learned at my father’s funeral
Do we know that any lives have been saved as a result of flame retardants being used in furniture?

The article suggests that flame retardants do not slow down furniture fires in real world scenarios. The problem is that they are used in only the foam padding. The couch fabric is not treated. The foam itself appears to offer little resistance to fire if it is already covered in flames (like if fabric is on fire). This is where more research is needed.

If the chemicals don't slow down furniture fires and save lives, then there is no value to having them inside foam.
I wonder if a captcha is really even necessary here considering that all users are reviewed?
This is a bad thing made worse by the fact that victims are unwilling to come forward because it is embarrassing.
The level of discourse on HN lately is absurd. Here is a new CEO that appears to be looking to change things for the positive, yet everyone wants to be cynical and doubting. Yet when startups have major f* ups, the conversation is much different.

Lets all admit change is slow and that paypal is still one of the more trusted payment solutions accepted globally. It would be nice to be able to use them in the future with some continued reliability.
Considering Python is possibly the most popular web dev language at the moment, yes, I would suggest you consider it.
I would not at all be surprised if this was the case. We all saw what happened to eBay and PayPal
Welcome Andy!

I live about an hour South of SF, and I'm not able to get out of my
house very often, so unfortunately, I can't take you up on the
invitation.

There are a lot of tech-heavy meetup events, hacker spaces, user groups,
and clubs around the area. A lot of it depends on your interests,
everything from grubwithus, to the hacker dojo, to audrino clubs, to all
sorts of software/user groups and hackathons. If you dig around in
the `net, you'll find a lot more. Getting involved will help you meet
others with similar interests.

Good luck!
It's clear that SO adds a ton of value in general, and I've frequently found it useful when I'm working with a new and unfamiliar piece of technology and can't quite figure something out. I've found it to be sort of annoying as an answerer, though, and don't really hang out there looking for interesting questions to answer anymore.

The biggest problem is that some people treat it like a game of Jeopardy, except with no penalty for incorrect answers. This is especially true when the questions are dealing with weird corner cases in languages or libraries - it often looks like there is an obvious answer, but it isn't always so simple.

I used to take the time to get the code running on my machine (if it was simple enough), figure out what was wrong, fix it, and then take the time to try to educate the person asking, rather than simply telling them what code to paste in to fix it.

This takes time, and in while I was working on it, you'd have someone come in, and blurt out some guess as to why it wasn't working, then edit their answer a bunch of times and maybe eventually get it right. I don't know why, but it always bothered me to see someone who guessed around (and maybe looked at better answers in the meantime) getting credit for really sloppy work.

I guess I don't know how you'd fix that, and it doesn't seem to be a big enough of a problem to keep the site from being useful, but it is still kind of annoying.
Though I haven't used it in a long time I really like Fluid. Don't get me wrong, I get what you're saying about APIs and their relation to native apps as well as the protocol thing. Those are all really good reasons to have native apps. I was specifically talking about Twitter and yeah I guess I did throw in other sites but I had a very narrow segment of web apps I use in mind actually.

I never knew so many people hated the web based twitter. I never had a problem with it. So now I get why people love their twitter app so much. Thanks for not getting all defensive in your reply. I didn't realize people would take my original comment as if it were aggressive or something.
Retinize Any Mac App With Retinizer
Because of this the policy now is that some duplication is good[1]. Though a lot of users are still rabid about closing, I always try to answer inexact duplicates, and if the their title doesn't lead to duplicates, point out the things they should have searched for (ie, object picking, hit testing and point in path are three names for very similar things)

[1] http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-...
This looks awesome. You should consider sticking it somewhere and giving it a name, so that I might find it 6 months from now when I'm motivated to fix my shitty Python script [1].

Also, a side question: is it normal/considered a best practice in ruby to monkey-patch built-in libraries like that? I know ruby has open classes, but I'm just curious how using them in this way is regarded.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494437
What Academics Do: The Big Five
When you train your network, you'll want to be loading mini-batches into memory. I've found flat files just fine for data sets of about 50,000 to 300,000 samples. The model itself will just be a matrix and a vector for each layer. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about getting going/speeding things up, happy to help. They can be really slow or reasonably fast depending on the implementation.
clicky http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/09/on-provable-...
Thanks very much. I'll take a look.
"Real Actors Reading Yelp Reviews" justifies any amount of sock puppetry.
I like it!

Until I came across this I have always used Mailinator, which did the job. This is perhaps even easier as I can just have a single throw away email linked - and use it until I am sick of the spam.

Nice!

--

Edit: By the way, I think the 2nd example is incorrect, should it read: `Subject: alias jason`
Another annoyance the author didn't mention is that unzippers frequently mangle the filename and/or metadata if it uses Unicode. Archive Manager is the worst at this.
Simple Things Every Computer User Should Know How to Do
I confess I haven't read the entire article, but from the abstract I was wondering, why 143 kilometers (they answer this: distance to satellites), and why those two islands (except to maybe show off that they were teleporting in the lap of luxury)? I'm guessing it's because there is no physical link between the two, so it will reduce skeptics' abilities to say "this is a hoax, there is a cable connecting the two stations."
I mean `(#myapp/person {:first "Fred" :last "Mertz"})' or `(#seconds 330)'. In this case it's probably the extra parentheses that get old fast. Even so, having semantically connected items not be stuck together makes me a bit queasy.