skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, the lighter text does punish the original poster, indirectly. It lowers the likelihood of engagement by an audience and I like that subtle approach more than heavy-handed alert warnings. Sites that have that kind of approach feel like I'm in the principal's office and being scolded for no good reason. Subtle encouragement to do other types of behavior feels more like I'm in a hippie montessori school instead - we're not going to come down with the stick if you behave a certain way, but we're not going to give you the carrot unless you do better.
What if you automatically created a new canary every day with the date in it? Something like something-really-long-xyz-yyyy-mm-dd@yourdomain.com. Then you could find out exactly when your database was stolen. If all canaries up to 2009-01-01 were spammed, and later ones weren't, you'd know they dumped your db on New Year's Day.

Not sure how much that would help either though.
C has worked pretty well for me.
Looks like a great introduction. My copy of Modern Information Retrieval (1999) is starting to show its age as well and from glancing through the table of contents, as pointed out in Greg's post, this really seems to hit a lot of the recent trends in IR. Up to chapter 11 is kind of a review of traditional IR and then from chapter 11 on it has a pretty impressive chunk of IR from the last decade (which is often what's missing in introductory texts). Added to my Amazon wishlist. :-)
I received this book as a gift, and it's certainly fascinating. But one thing the review fails to mention are the excellent pictures and diagrams. The book is printed on glossy paper, and the pictures are full color and high resolution.
well there are certainly traits like low IQ which can become imprinted on a person by working in a "low-status" job or having "low-status" ancestors. These traits are discriminated against by admissions officers and hiring managers. This is our version of the ant's scent of garbage.

But I suppose it is also possible that if we could ask them the ants would claim that their society was completely meritocratic and that the individuals in their society who were confined to sanitation work were inferior in talent to the higher status ants.
I left out portfolios in my meta-answer below, it feels like the first thing designers concentrate on and typically procrastinate on forever because they build it up in their heads to something that needs to be perfect before it can be unveiled. I know because I've done this and so has every designer I've ever talked to.

Having said that, yeah, having a folio up is definitely worthwhile. I went freelance in Nov and have been booked solid with work every day since just because of the case study area of my site I put up during the summer:

http://alabut.com/work.html
But wouldn't the "canary" idea be more useful if the email was changed frequently? Suppose a cron job updated the email address every day to include a few non-obvious characters encoding the current date so that the spam you get tells you when that row was copied from your database.
C, as a cross-platform language is fine...but, make on different platforms gets really ugly. It's not terrible across the modern Open Source platforms, like Linux and FreeBSD (and there's pretty good doc coverage of building compatible makefiles or using GNU autotools), but on systems that don't have the GNU autotools, and have a proprietary make, it can be incredibly painful to deal with.

It's been a few years since I dealt with distributing C across many platforms, but I can't imagine it's changed dramatically for the better (since make has been famously painful for about as long as it has existed).
C's not a bad choice but it's worth mentioning that the last time I installed Ubuntu (admittedly it's been a while) there where three versions of GCC installed automatically, but none of the damn library files (wtf is up with that anyway?). Not a major deal to go fetch the library files but even so...
"Makes us feel best", "Gets noticed over the clutter", "[Gives] us the illusion of social status"

Those are the lures that each niche uses, sure, but the result is that we lose time. The result is the problem, not the drug packaging or delivery mechanism.

If anything, that makes it more disturbing: whatever our psychological needs, there's electronic joy out there competing for them.

Not sure how it will play out. I'm an optimist, but after I wrote this it's kind of drug me down. I'm sure we'll muddle through somehow as a species. We always do.
/bin/sh on Linux systems (except Ubuntu) is BASH

Bash is supposed to behave like sh if it is invoked as /bin/sh. (I'm not sure how good a job it does at this, but at least it tries to be standards-compliant.)
I see nothing specific to U.S.

The parallels are even more apparent inside prison walls.
Some people like to use http://www.searchyc.com for their searches.
Try Googling "Alfie Kohn." He's an educator who's a big fan of abolishing letter grades, and also homework.
Restaurant business liability insurance rate quotes
www.RestaurantInsurance.Com Restaurant insurance rate quotes for California Restaurants.
Six ways to experiment with AdSense and grow your earnings
Must be the smell of recession envy in the air.
Very helpful description of the overall strategy employed - along with details for implementation in iframe, and lots of implications for cURL, etc.
makes me want train crows as well.
It's probably because I suck at CSS =) For an example of a mobified site styled by a CSS pro over a couple of hours check out http://spin.mobify.me . Perhaps you can do a better job yourself - our platform is an open service.
thanks =] sometimes my mind jumps to the worst solution first, not sure why. after you look at something like that, it's sort of a "wow.. duh.." moment.
Thanks for the feedback, most of these will be rolled out shortly. Glad you liked it!
These places seem like they're more targeted toward producing physical products. I'd focus on digital. Still think it's a viable idea for sure.
My first reaction to the design was "landing page!". It looks so much like a parked domain...
Depends what it needs to do, of course. Can you tell us a bit more?
Ask HN: Review my Startup, MotoListr.com
Hello All,

My startup is called MotoListr @ http://motolistr.com

The website is a motorcycle classified site that's incredibly simple. The first page you come to is the actual searching application. The default is to show ALL motorcycles.

I started the site because I got fed up with competing sites with more advertisements than content, and broken and non-intuitive search/sort functions.

This is my first end to end project, I taught myself PHP/MySQL along the way.

Please let me know your first impressions/opinions of the site.

Thank you,
Nick
Clickable link / http://motolistr.com
I think you are to pay lawyers to figure out what disclaimers you must make, etc, if you are in this kind of business, otherwise is just gambling.
You made me think of the power and success of the Obama campaign. Lots of people donating $5 or $10 to his website was a lot like a charitable fundraising campaign. A unqiue, personal approach that focused on conecting with his 'users' and giving them what they wanted.
traits like low IQ [...] can become imprinted on a person by working in a "low-status" job

Could you be more explicit? Do you mean that holding a low-status job causes a reduction in IQ?
One possible method for building user bases - one zipcoed at a time: signs - see the thread on SomeLittleTownsingles.com a while back.
Everyone should get an A
I love this book. The best thing about dispelling some of my ignorance has been taking some of those absurd half formed, completely misinterpreted ideas I had and replacing them with actual understanding. God knows what I thought Rings, Fields and Groups were before I read this book, but now I at least have a basic understanding.

A friend of a friend found a pre-print copy in a torrent.
Not much happening here, but a very simple interface.
Clear, easy to navigate. Though little basic.
Sending email page has funny question "Are you human?" - isn't that too easy to crack? You don't even take 'y' as an answer, only obvious ans is 'yes'!

From biz perspective - how do you plan to monetize? By $9 listing? What would this provide that Craigslist doesn't? Sorry to sound -ve, but I just wonder... because I am dealing with similar questions about monetization in my startup, though in a diff space.
All the best!
Ask HN: How do you find work?
I'm a freelance RoR and PHP developer with every other relevant skill set (XHTML, CSS, AJAX, SQL, et cetera), but I'm having a rather difficult time finding work.

I'm rushing Craigslist, writing on my blog, and asking everyone I know if they know anyone in need.

The economy has been treating me miserably lately, and I haven't had work in over a month. Do any of you guys have tips for me?
It's really amusing (in an oh-my-God-I'm-fucked way) to try and debug type errors in Happy-generated parsers. There have been times when the type of the function (not even the whole error message) has been a page long.

C++ STL code can be similarly (un)fun.
In the article, he mentions examples of positive effects of opiates, particularly surgical anesthesia (via morphine, although ether and nitrous oxide were initially used). Heroin was also used as an antitussive, etc. Other solutions with less serious side-effects were later found, of course, but at the time, they really saved lives. Major surgery without anesthesia was a terrifying ordeal, and, before antibiotics, many conditions meant surgery or death.

Some technology makes me more productive (refrigerators, text editors, bicycles, vaccines), and some makes me less (Flash games, irc, hacker news). Others have a mixed effect (cell phones, books). Technology takes many forms, and it's hard to generalize about them all in any sound way.
The average consumer probably won't be aware that certain services are being impaired by their ISP. If their provider is involved in throttling traffic to and from a competitor's website, the average person will probably just think that it's a rubbish slow site.
Open source projects are a way to keep yourself visible, although of course that's not an immediate way to find work. Ask friends, lower your prices... it's probably tough with the current economy.
Yeah. I think $1000 is reasonable. I'm basically making a list of about 20 friends to get a loan from. I still have the intention of paying the loan though at some point even if my startup fails.
There are so many things wrong with this anecdote that I'm really not sure if it is even worth debating. I'm not going to create a laundry list, since to do so would just cover most points of both the articles.

However, it should be obvious to anyone reading this that the comparison isnt fair, at all, since by and large it ignores the middle class. It is more appropriate to compare averages, or income level brackets than the top and bottom extremes.

The 'success' of our society has been that we elevated large sections of the servants, slaves, and peasants to middle class, not that we have been or should be motivated by having less rich people. Moreover, its important to assess how rich people became rich, which also sets us, at least partially, better than rich by hereditary land ownership. Finally, as a society, do we really want to remove the ability to become filthy rich as a motivator?
Here's a screenshot of the email you sent.

http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/5822/email-from-form.tiff

I'm going to target the Niche, and spend the income from the site on advertising to get it popular. Dealers are be able to list at a discount by buying bulk listings at a reduced price per listing.

The reason I can charge is because:

1. Ebay charges $30 for a motorcycle listing
2. CycleTrader (closest competitor) charges $25+
3. My website is simpler, with NO ADS just pure content.
4. When the $9 the customer pays for a listing... they're going to get much more than $9 in benefits. I'm going to create value any way possible. Free listings that are ad supported also depend on pageviews and exposure... which means that if the site is too successful... it will undermine itself because the bikes will sell and content will disappear too quickly.
What's your point? Sure. Set up a canary account. It won't hurt you. But the only way it will help is if your monitoring regime is already so good that it works with or without the canary.
I also added "y" to the accepted answers for "Are you human?"

It is easy to crack, but it does protect from the automated spambots. A captcha just seems to detract from the user experience, I think.

Thanks for your help.
No, that wouldn't improve it at all. The problem with the canary is that it's a weak, not particularly useful signal: "we probably got compromised".

Here, let me help all of you with web apps out right now: you have probably been compromised.

Go do something about it. Then come back and tell me what you did.
> The external evidence is lacking -- there's not some huge increase in SAT scores

Plus you state in your article that people are getting less intelligent; what do you base that on? How do you explain the Flynn effect?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
All that would tell you is the earliest date your database was compromised and then sold to spammers. If an attacker can harvest your database once, they can do it repeatedly --- which is why warning all your users to change their passwords in this situation is a bad idea.
Ants and termites are awesome.

The organism analogy of an insect society is actually due to Eugene Marais (who studied termites). An interesting book of termites is Soul of the White Ant which you can find here: http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0302hsted/030213marais/Th... It is pretty readable for a book that is >75 years old.

Termites can have little fungal farms. They also have tunnels stretching down to the water table so that it can get water even in dry times.
List comprehensions cover 90% of the use cases, but I'm glad map and filter were not removed. List comprehensions do not have first class status. You can pass map and filter around as arguments to other functions, but you cannot pass around "for", "in", and "if".
Keep trying! I didn't mean to dishearten, just to give feedback. Everything sucks when it's first released, almost without exception.
After high school, I got a job doing construction work - I was treated badly and I felt a lot stupider afterwards :)

Seriously, there have been a lot of studies which have shown a modest (temporary?) increase of IQ for people living in an "enriched" environment. ask google. Presumably, an "enriched" environment is one that is similar to the environments of high-status people.

A job is an important part of one's environment, but so is living in a "low-status" home, or going to a "low-status" school which I think would have a similar effect. (I'm using quotation marks for low-status because I feel that these terms imply moral judgements that I don't share) Note that I also mentioned the importance of having low-status ancestors - and IQ has been shown to be heritable.
that hasn't got much to do with the nature of TCP/IP but with the nature of the various links that your traffic will take and the limitations of the web server you are querying.

In a simple test situation (say ftp or http over a lan link) you are using TCP/IP/and some hardware link layer and you'll see close to wire speed.
Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens
Your statements don't make sense. In one paragraph you're saying that regulations are destroying 'our' liberty, yet the next paragraph you want the government to enforce laws and by this all the regulations enforced by the law.

I'm sorry, but I worked as an electrician for several years in the UK. There's regulations on everything from the thickness of the cable to how low a wall socket can be mounted to how high a light switch can be mounted. The regulation book is almost two inches thick. There's no big nationalized companies except for industrial electrical work, like wiring up factories. Every single person I worked with worked for themselves or for a small company, most of which were father-son companies.

Regulations for electrical work were put into place to stop people scamming people and burning your house down. Here in Canada regulations only came around relatively recently, and from people I've talked to (many are electricians from the UK) they're utterly disgusted with what people got away with. One house had its lighting done with speaker wire attached to a 10 amp fuse, by all rights that house should have burnt down.

Here in Canada there's virtually no regulations on phone companies. They introduce new charges however they want, Bell even charges you if there's a problem with their equipment they installed. Back home that's not even heard of, BT came into our house numerous times to fix problems. There's also numerous smaller companies you can go with, in fact there's a flood of them for everything.

Speaking from experience, regulation helps people. It makes it harder for big companies to bully the little guy and allows a much more even playing field. It also prevents the whole pyramid scheme of big business, where thousands of people working for $10 an hour do all the work for a few people being paid $10,000 an hour. In fact, nearly everyone in the business makes an extremely good wage (I think our best pay was ~$4000 for ~3 days work) and incompetent people tend to go out of business through lack of business or lawsuits.
Are there any relevant local meetups or foo/bar/startup/etc camps? Any sort of gathering where there'll be other local people you can meet and talk to?
Displaying in an easy to use manner on mobile devices is a new feature.
Did you try Scriptlance.com, HireACoder.com, or any of those type of sites?

I know there are some cheap people on there, but those that use that kind of site often know not to hire the least expensive.

Do you have any ideas of your own?

Take this time to create your own startup. I have a ton of ideas that are self-sustaining if you're interested.
Hm. My work finds me most of the time, but every now and then I'm running on 'idle' for a month or more and I start to look around. One of the things I've found over the years that it pays big time to keep in contact with all your business buddies. Let them know you exist and that you still remember them and every now and then a job will pop out of that.

Networking is a thing that I seriously hate, you won't find me on cocktail parties / friday get togethers, I live far away from my customer base but an occasional email does wonders in staying attached and maintaining mindshare.

It's a bit like a pipeline, jobs are always pushed in on one end and out the other when they're done, if you neglect the 'in' queue while focusing on a job you'll see a longer gap by the time that you're ready for the next one. That's a tricky balancing act when you are a single freelancer, maybe teaming up with a few other people with similar or complimentary skills would help you to find work easier, and if too many people say 'yes' at the same time you can always divide the load.

Also, the economy really is down, and lots of tech projects are on hold or being scrapped right now, this is not the best time to be looking for work.
And yet J.K. Rowling became one of the richest women in England by writing a book.

I think it's not so much that the market for fiction is shrinking, I think it's that it's becoming more hit-driven. It used to be that reading was a solitary pursuit, and you checked a book out because it looked interesting on a library shelf (I still do this, but I'm one of the few folks I know of that do).

Now, most people read books because their friends do, and they want to read what their friends are reading. So popular books become more popular, while unpopular books get no sales or readership. This also increases the drive towards universally-applicable themes (a book that flies over the heads of 99% of the population isn't going to get word-of-mouth), which is why you see them as being less challenging.

Same goes for games. When I first started playing MM0RPGs in 1993, it was impossible to find an average person on the street that played them. Now, half my friends are addicted to WoW. Video games are a social enterprise, so they need to be a lowest-common-denominator. If you want text-only RPGs or Civilization 4, they're still out there. But if you want to play with your friends, you have to put up with your friends' varying skill levels.
> At the very least to an outside observer it seems that there is a huge amount of time and energy being spent in something with no physical results.

You say that as if it's a bad thing, it isn't. The greatest things we tend to seek aren't physical things, but mental states like love and happiness. It matter not whether the things that invoke those mental states come from the real world or the virtual.
Yes, I have two startups that are on their way to being very successful. Though, it'll take 4-6 months before I'm financially free of working at all.

Unfortunately, I don't have that much saved up.
you mean like array[mod(i, length) + 1]
Thanks for this. I need to network a little more.
the 2000 US table includes NY city clerk with an income of 35k (close to the US median) and a multiple of 3. an MD's take was a multiple of 157.

I agree with you that it's misleading because it doesn't include the relative size of these classes. Someone should compute the GINI coefficient for the 1830's france.

If you have a situation where people take home paychecks 154 times larger than the "middle-class" income for bankrupting their companies - this large middle class feels unjustly treated (they are routinely fired for much lesser offenses) and will vote for confiscatory legislation. Remember the behavioral econ results about the irrational behavior in the ultimatum game.
Introducing Measurement Lab
All of this begs the question: What is the meaning of life?

If you think of it, everything people do is quite remarkably purposeless.

Why does life exist?

Why do you exist???????
How to get a 600% boost in sales for your iPhone App
I think it's more useful to think of projects like this as experiments rather than final products.

The UI paradigms and metaphors we use today have been the same for nearly 20 years -- it's good to see people working at the edges.
Such a strange article considering that nearly all of the web is text. The vast majority of internet time is spent reading.
Be careful about what you do when you 'network'. If you contact people without a having a good reason for it, they'll learn to think of you as someone who doesn't value their time. Instead, it's just good to get in the habit of thinking, every time you learn something, "I wonder who among my business contacts would find this most useful."
Uhhh, so the no brainer way to boost your iPhone App sales is to jut get Apple to feature your app in one of their ads?

How about some advice on getting into an Apple ad.
I tried Ubiquity, but I found the requirement that you be in Firefox to use it a little to restrictive to make it truly useful. I still only spend ~30% of the time on a computer inside a browser.

On the other hand, Google's Quick Search Box (http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/) is looking a lot like Ubiquity without the browser!
As should you. Computer networks are not used primarily for controlling other people. Mysticism, and more generally all forms of religion, have the primary purpose of controlling people, of enforcing approved behavioral patterns among the general populace.

Ignorance of such a very basic thing as what is and what isn't real is an appalling state to purposely manipulate people into and is more than enough to damn all such practices.
"Not every good idea can make a profit."
- - - - -

One might argue, that by definition a 'good idea' is one that is profitable for its pursuer.

Don't confuse the exchange of federal reserve notes for profit.

By your saying "When you demand that all ideas do, you'll be missing out..." I take it you are not confused in this regard.