skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How does this differ from, say, MochiAds, GarageGames, WildTangent, Steam, XBox Live Marketplace, or the iPhone App Store? (not to be critical, just curious)
Fears over eastern Europe trigger bond rush
> the government should be investing like an actual investor who wants to get their money back.

You're wrong about about both the goal and the capabilities of govt.
Also mentioned on NewScientist.com: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484827
babysnake,

The graphics are great but I dislike how much you have used animation; it cheapens the site.

The quiz itself was pretty fun, but I was confused about how to actually start it. It took me some time clicking, and even then it was cumbersome to get going. Also it would be great to know how many questions are left in the quiz.

Then at the end it says "Please sign in to save your quiz." but doesn't show me how to see my results without signing up. So, I didn't.

I can tell you have put a lot of work into this, but you have usability issues. It is clunky, and not entirely intuitive to use. I would suggest getting people to use the site and watch them while they do so.

Hope this is more helpful than not,
Jeremy
...your clients rarely have a good idea what they want...

Not my experience. Once you frame the question properly, they often know exactly what they want. It's not that they need "search", it's why they need search.

"Oh, you need to be able to determine the top 3 x's whenever y happens so that you can do z."

Fine. Just tell me the "what" and the "why" and I'll figure out the "how".

I understand your pain. Most of my clients skip ahead to the "how" before expressing their implicit "whys" and "whats". It's our job as systems analysts to slow them down and do it right. But then we never did sign up for easy, did we?
Thank You for having understood it very well.

You might find it useful personally, if you look at it this way:

"You will now be able to receive DMs from people you have @replied some time, irrespective of whether you are now following them"

And you might find the app useful, in general if you have a look at this: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=cant+dm
It's the all american stuff: we don't want to hurt your feelings so we are going to tell you that we'll get back to you :)...
Most are afraid to tell straight in the face...
Half The Charges Against The Pirate Bay Dropped, But The Circus Ain’t Over Yet
All-Terrain Crane Lego Model - Detailed technical explanation
Cool video.
Agreed. If the transparency Obama claims materializes, it could end the grafting and pork.

Also, this website could keep a handful of people employed! Yay!
Photons, Neurons and Bits: Holography for the 21st Century
Recovery.gov uses jQuery on Drupal
I'm guessing it's because exposing batteries to direct sunlight isn't a safe thing to do. Additionally, it might reduce the recharge capacity by affecting the components inside.
I find it refreshing that they even recognize this question: a stark contrast to past federal "know-nothing" approaches to hacking & tech.
> When you do a "git commit" the result sits on your machine. It goes nowhere.

Those of us who don't know git are now confused.

We're used to having "the result" on our local machine without interacting with our source control system. So, why do git users use its "commit" command to accomplish that?

We're used to "commit" meaning something like "publish". We're pretty sure that git has something similar, so we're wondering what it's called and why it wasn't called commit.

To refer to another discussion, this example makes it look like git requires more user actions to accomplish what we want to do and it uses idiosyncratic terminology. It's unclear why we'd view either of those as an improvement....
Yes... I think this article is almost entirely not factual. I think it very likely that moot is making a very decent living and does not live with his mother.
Why not just use IM then? Make up a screenname and mention it on your site. You get a lot more features like blocking, local history/logging etc. Most IMs now support offline messaging too.
The idea that there is a single fundamental particle blows my mind more than a model of matter being made of an infinite series of smaller and smaller components.
Research to reconstruct facial features from DNA sample
Aside: I hear via twitter that it's running Drupal.
Don't forget the portals: Kongregate, Miniclip, NewGrounds, AddictingGames, Facebook App Directory
I think that you would have a tough time charging batteries like this, primarily because a cylindrical surface will have very little direct (normal to its surface) sunlight. Most of your solar cell surface seems to be either in the shadow, or at a pretty weak angle. It would be far more effective to have a foldable umbrella like thing that you open up and point at the sun.
Thanks for the feedback, Jeremy.

I'm actually doing a lot of logging to see what people do on different pages, but I do agree that its crucial to do some in-person usability testing.
The "anti-oxidants prevent cancer" model may not be working out--if only because cancer may be an emergent property of a number of different processes--but fish oil (omega-3 fatty acids) is absolutely worth taking to prevent heart disease. See for example http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4632
:tabe
Creating Social Network Profiles Can Help You In The Search Engines
Now that you have just launched your website - its time to get found in the search engines! I always feel that it's important to dominate at least the first page of Google with your name and URL as you are getting started.
> That's a good idea but it could have the consequences that a poor person would have to front money to go to trial, just in case he or she lost.

Not necessarily. Some "loser pays" systems allow the plaintiff's lawyers (or an insurance company) to take the risk of paying the defendant's costs if the lawsuit is unsuccessful. (The key is that those systems allow such folks to get paid for taking that risk.)

In the US, when a contingency lawyer loses a case, s\he is typically out his time and occasionally expenses as well. Loser-pays "just" doubles the hit from a loss.

I'm not saying that loser-pays is a good idea, I'm just saying that it doesn't necessarily exclude poor folks.
curl is higher level. It implements a number of protocols like HTTP. nc is basically raw sockets. You can listen on a port with curl like you can with nc.
It's true: http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/02/recoverygov-uses-jquery-o...
I don't accept that this is the case. Programming is boring when it involves repetitive tasks that require little mental power to complete. But any any task that is simple and repetitious is also a task that can be automated.

I don't think developers look for a way to make a project "interesting" just for kicks. At least in my experience, there is a genuine desire to improve the process, to automate everything that can be automated, to invent and create something that's much better than the original.

And sure, they might not get it right on the first attempt, but that's why you attempt to fail early. There is this odd notion that code is sacrosanct; that once created, it must never be discarded, that we should never change our initial ideas, no matter how wrong they may be. I'm of the opinion that this is not a good way to solve a problem. If you're heading in the wrong direction, then you turn around. You don't keep driving, hoping for the best, yet this is exactly what most software projects seem to do, and why they ultimately end up in disaster.

The ingenuity of the developers is not necessarily at fault; rather its that they or their managers are afraid to fail early, so they fail when it's too late. We shouldn't shy away from ingenious solutions because of this. The corporate world is too short of ingenuity as it is, and no more so than in the field of software development.
nc is one of the first tools I install on a fresh OS.
Looks like it, there's mention of drupal in a javascript call near the bottom of the source. Nice clean html too from a quick glance - wonder if this is the same team as did Obama's election site, similar visual style. Good stuff.
I agree that if we decide that 0 is the identity element then the concept of the kernel does have meaning. Well except that the article says the map isn't defined over {1111, 2222, 3333, ... , 9999} However 0 is just the additive identity and there's really no reason to select addition. We could just as easily select the multiplicative identity (1). So yes if you arbitrarily select 0 and then redefine function you can form a concept of the kernel (it's pretty boring as far as I can see).

However the article does specifically say that 6174 is the kernel. Now for that to be correct under your definition it would need to be true that:
7641 - 1467 = 0
Which we all know to be false. Your post seems to suggest that you think this use of kernel was a poor word choice instead of completely incorrect. Perhaps you could send me the details that your post promises.
This is really overly sensitive. The word "bitch" is offensive to women? I talk to women all the time that use the word. They don't seem offended by it.

Anyway, I don't think anyone on the Internet cares what gender you are. Women just don't seem to be that interested in programming.
"Mission Accomplished"

...
A well known quote (in the right circles):

"Real men reduce from 3SAT" -- Christos Papadimitriou [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/]
The first thing I do, typically, is write out the requirements.

If I already have requirements, I rephrase them in my own writing.

Then I start sketching out some possible solutions in notes, as brief phrases. I may start writing code at this point, but I continue making notes occasionally.
Whenever I join a sewing-related IRC channel, I am inundated with sexual advances because of my obviously-male nickname. This needs to stop, or men will never have a fair shake at being sew-ers. (sewers?)

Oh wait, sorry. I was confusing a situation I made up in my mind with reality.
I definitely do way more important work on Twitter than on Fax machines, and these days probably only behind email. Don't underestimate how useful and fast twitter can be.
I also wonder circuit satisfiability is tacked as a nexus in the graph. 3-SAT seems like a better choice due to Cook's theorem being such a big deal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook–Levin_theorem
Indeed. I thought it was ironic that the author was trying to relate sloppy formatting of code to the overall technical incompetence of the programmer.
"If the transparency Obama claims materializes, it could end the grafting and pork."

Have you read much about this bill?
The Ruby on Rails Forms Microformat Explained (with nesting for release 2.3)
> Canada and Australia have pretty open immigration policies and their standard of living is higher than in the US.

Which direction is net-migration?

I don't know the answer, but I trust that statistic more than any "causal"/"{wherever} is better because of the {factor number}" argument. Why? Because it's easy to find a factor that is better for any destination but feet tell the truth.
"I'm not sure there is such thing as an inherently boring software project."

Have you never heard of SAP?
> what does "highest-point" submission mean? How are points measured? Where can you view them?

Points are measured by the number of up-votes. In theory, submissions are more "recession-proof" than comments because they cannot be downvoted.

http://searchyc.com/user/sam_in_nyc?only=submissions&sor...
Awesome situation. I can't do either, but I'd sure rather learn Linux. More power to you.
The Human Obsession With "Formal Proofs" is a Waste of Time
I start by building the smallest possible subset of the answer as fast as possible. I think Paul Buchheit said he liked to do this too.
Perhaps I'm overly cynical.
A Mathematical Theory of Origami Constructions and Numbers (pdf file)
On the Mathematics of Flat Origamis
Neat to see all the open source software being used (Apache, PHP, MySQL, Drupal, jQuery, MIT Simile Timeline, etc). And once again YouTube is front and center.

Mix in an API and they'll be rocking.
This is part of the bill^.

SEC. 1201. TRANSPARENCY REQUIREMENTS. (b) (1) (A)

Each such agency shall notify the public of funds obligated to particular infrastructure investments by posting the notification on the website Recovery.gov.

[Continues from there... details at SEC. 1226. RECOVERY.GOV.]

This site improves accessibility but not transparency. All congressional bills are already readily available... but it's limited to watchdogs and those few that are motivated enough to find and read them.

^ http://appropriations.house.gov/pdf/RecoveryBill01-15-09.pdf

EDIT: Formatting.
People see the conversation, and that is valuable. Public customer support is how Twitter is going to make money (in part). IM clients are extremely distracting. Real-time but asynchronous messaging is not the same as synchronous messaging.

You can block people on twitter, and log messages. Better than that, you can access the conversations via an API.
I remember when the funding for the SSC got pulled. Had actually been to Waxahachie shortly after they started digging and was doing a summer internship at Fermilab.

Everyone was fighting to get it funded and built in their backyard but as soon an actual site was decided, it suddenly became a boondoggle, pork, or what have you by those very same people.
Not just investors. There is a collection of people associated to varying degrees with YC who advise the startups. (They're the old-looking people in the slides on our frontpage.) Sometimes they invest, but they don't only talk to startups they invest in.

One of the hardest parts of being in Boston for us was that this pool of advisors was so much smaller there. It was just a handful of people. Whereas in the Valley there are on the order of 50 different people we might introduce one or more YC startups to each cycle.
This was my approach also, until I find that growing a project "organically" ends up being very disorganized and missing "the bigger picture," compared to the open code I read. I sometimes also find a mistaken assumption at the start led me in a wrong direction from the start.

I'm just trying to refine my coding without losing the instant satisfaction of hacking something together at the start and seeing it work.
Microsoft in talks to acquire Israeli startup 3DV Systems
This sounds like an Onion headline.

"Economy forces civility."

Kind of sad, actually.
Hmm, maybe his goal with this bill is to have something to show the public the extent of the grafting and pork. Then make everything transparent, push them all out of office.
I'm starting to like my imagined version of Obama.
It's all in how you use the word, I'm sure.

As for, "Women just don't seem to be..." types of generalizations... not a place I'd like to go. The same is sometimes generalized about people of my ethnicity; but that doesn't reduce my wish to be received with respect and consideration.

Do take a look at all the (women) signatories at the bottom of one of the linked articles in original post. [Several links seem to have gone dead in just the last half hour.]
And not all of that attention desirable or even respectful.
I'm glad their words are starting to catch up to the Republican party's deeds:

http://www.gop.gov/api

Open, competitive government is probably a good thing; the fact that different parts of the government are competing to see who can be more open is even better.
It could be that they decided to go with someone else, but in case the other guy screws it up they want to keep you on standby without paying you yet.

Often times companies just want to see proposals for the sake of evaluating an idea - they may not have even committed to going through with their plans.

A possible solution: In your proposal, include an offer deadline so that the current offer expires within a certain time (whatever makes sense for your industry). This way you can know with or without hearing from them if they are ready to move forward. If a flat out deadline seems too rude, include a proposed timeline for your project using real dates (we would start on the 1st of March and be done in the middle of May), but tell them that you can only guarantee those dates if they give you the green light within a week, otherwise you'll have to re-check your schedule and give them a new timeline.
I began taking a daily multivitamin and fish oil (sometimes flax seed) because I felt that my diet wasn't healthy during my college years. Placebo effect or not, I felt better and in general my life improved. Even if it isn't a direct effect of the contents of the multivitamin, the price is so insignificant and the benefit so great that it easily passes cost/benefit analysis.
Resident Evil 5 Sneak Peek: Co-op Gameplay
Exponentially? Not that I'm aware of. I've seen examples of highly focused niche sites that have generated nontrivial (and growing) ad revenue, but so far nothing viral. And really this touches on one of the key problems in the newspaper world today: editors who are looking for the next Big Thing to replace the classifieds cash cow. I believe tremendous resources are being squandered on what is basically a waste of time. If there was one overarching business model that was going to "save" newspapers, someone would have struck on it by now and everyone would be following suit. The future (again if one exists) is in many carefully managed small revenue streams.
Has human evolution stopped?
Even published on the recovery.gov site, it is still difficult to hone in on specific information. The bill is just entirely to big to be easily "accessible." Some type of smart search engine for it would be handy.
@TwitterHR For Future Reference, Use BCC When Rejecting Applicants
First I get some sort of framework in place where development is quick and enjoyable... whether that be having an IDE set-up for the project, or setting up __autoload() in PHP so that I don't have to put requires everywhere.. I just want to be sure I can code and not be distracted by overhead issues unrelated to the problem at hand.

As per the actual coding, I agree with pg on this. I divide the problem into "sub problems," often sketched out in pencil with flows for certain things (and maybe corresponding UI's, if it demands). I choose to start work on either the most important (central) process, or often the most interesting one (to get me warmed up and enthused about the problem). Once this is done, it's a matter of branching outwards from that process, and optionally filling in UI's corresponding to that process.

Along the way, refactors are inevitable, but most of the time I find I wouldn't have been able to predict them even if I'd initially spent a large amount of time doing conceptual models. I find the things that take the most time are the unexpected things, which I won't find out about until I'm coding it.

The one thing I enjoy most about having the process sketched out is the options it provides. For me, it's not so much the issue of coding that is the challenge, but giving every aspect of the project the attention it deserves, without getting too bogged down on devoting too much time to making one part really awesome. When I see all the work that needs to be done, and what's related to what, I realize the scale of the sub problem I'm working on may not be as profound as I'd like it to be.
No problem.. Sorry, I just saw that you are babyshake, not babysnake!

How much traffic have you gotten from this posting to HN?
CardPricer Finds There Is More Money Selling Baseball Card Data Than Selling Cards
Setting up UNIX file systems
Their link to netcat for windows supposedly from security focus definitely points to my website. I'm not actually affiliated with security focus in any way...

http://joncraton.org/files/nc111nt.zip

edit: They've fixed the link to actually point to securityfocus
easy mistake to make
I'm more offended by the guy's attitude than what he has to say. He sounds like some middle-aged manager who got miffed by some young "rockstar" (ugh, hate that word) and the kid's sense of entitlement... because it clashed with his own.

The "young hotshot" sense of entitlement is pretty repulsive, but so is the "fuck you, I'm your boss" attitude exemplified by the OP. The saving grace of the former is that it tends to fade after an ass-kicking or two.

Some general observations:

1. There's a difference between mundane and boring. Things that are mundane are not thrilling, but rather neutral in their psychological effect. Stopping at a red light is mundane. That which is boring is psychologically offensive. Mundaneness is fine (and inevitable) in software development. Boredom is different. Having a programmer spend 8 hours per day working on tax forms/compliance work, without the option of automating it, is just ridiculous. It actually is better to let him write an abstract system so that someone else's time-- preferably someone less expensive-- can be put to the "dirty work" using his tool.

2. The "big picture" of a project is what makes it interesting and provides motivation; the details of even the coolest projects are mundane. I'd even go so far as to say that 75% of the time spent on a cool project is still involved with mundane details. People unable to handle this fact generally don't become good programmers-- or good anything. What this means is that if someone's a decent programmer, his problem is not that he's unable or unwilling to do detailed work. Even on cool projects, programming is one of the most detail-oriented jobs there is.

3. Mundaneness escalates into boredom only when there are so many mundane details as to occlude the interesting part of the problem... or when no such interesting part exists (e.g. implementing compliance/tax logic). The pattern-match for the supplemental forms is a trivial example of a mundane detail, and certainly not enough to make a whole project "boring"... but 10000 lines of such code is going to become an incomprehensible mess (much like, well, the bulk of bureaucratic red-tape that exists in the business/legal world).

4. Taking a design perspective on this issue, boring things generally belong in data, not code. On the example of the supplemental forms, those rules should be encoded in such a way they can be put into a database. Computers are great for managing large masses of boring information. Humans are not.

5. At root, the OP sounds like he's whining about the fact that he's unable to motivate his employees and that his attitude (which, of course, is without flaws) turns them off.
| Startups at that stage can move.

Not all can, or are willing, whatever their reasons. While it might be smart business in your case to have picked your location and make the startups come to you, I think it's disingenuous to say that seed funding is not a regional business [because] startups at that stage can move.

I won't bore you with the specifics of my location or what's possible here, but I do think there's a good business opportunity for anybody that's willing to come up with a VC/incubator model similar to yours, but that can be deployed in lots of different locations.

Oh well. Bootstrapping isn't as much fun, but it'll get me there. :-)
Download tax worries US porn industry
NYC game-design inspired school Quest 2 Learn opening fall 2009
Improving the Firebug UI