skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe I'm just retarded, but I couldn't find the answer to my question on your site. Does your service just pound the exact page that's targeted, or does it follow links, submit forms, etc to try to simulate actual users?
I agree that it's complex. My point was more that to make sense of a complex system, as this certainly is, statistics are an essential tool. As you hint at averages don't tell the whole story, but they do give a rough overview.

Outliers, clusters, standard deviations, etc. make good tools too, unfortunately few people understand how to use them correctly - me included. This is probably why graphs are so common: they convey a lot of information in a way that most people can understand.
Also opening a couple dozen new browser windows is a good way to ensure your site is only used once.
Got a hard time finding another job due to his 'fame', maybe?
I don't like the pop ups, I want comparable data not 20 different pages, all of which I have to dig through before I get my information.
I've been working on a startup that is heavily reliant on R for more then a year. R is not at all an easy language to use/learn. I have never been able to really find what I would call a good resource for learning R. The online manual has incomprehensible examples, very rarely shows the output, and has very vague descriptions about what any method does. Additionally all the datatypes are bizarre.

I would recommend to anyone trying to learn R to digest the all the online books/materials on the Rattle site, and then to use Rattle heavily and look at the logs it produces.

Also getting R to work with php is unpleasant and involves reading a fair amount of Spanish comments.

All that hate said. I really love R and I don't know what I would be doing if it didn't exist.
I'll second that. For personal use it may seem like a lot of money, but for the target groups that needs this kind of service it's cheap. It's not just about the cost of servers, it's much more the time spent doing it.
I agree. Reality isn't what you want things to be. Reality isn't what I want things to be. Reality is what is.
I see. TDD works on poorly designed, poorly implemented, basically lousy code. Code that is highly coupled, withlow cohesion, and is inappropriately modularized. This necessitates that all code must be tested every time there is a "modification". Add to that the random unthoughtful modifications made by careless programmers who have identified the wrong problem to fix and you get constant disaster.

I say, fix the fundamental problem by not writing lousy code in the first place. THAT would really be adding value rather than simply adding job security busy work. Automated testing cannot fix lousy code. Most of the time, it can't even discover it.

There is no magical way that gets good results without knowledge, skill, understanding, thought, discipline, and effort. With those things, all you need are good enough tools. TDD may be one of those good enough tools in some limited circumstances. It is not a Silver Bullet that cures all, most, or even many software flaws.

Keep in mind that one really good programmer can out produce a team of twenty poor programmers. Also keep in mind that one poor programmer can keep twenty really good programmers busy cleaning up the trash they create.

TDD is a very poor band aid used to cover up an even more fundamental problem: most programmers are lousy at programming. That is the problem that need fixing.
These stunts by immature children are not making me any more sympathetic to the Pirate Bay folks.
Download Megavideo Video
Download Megavideo Video
Ask HN: [Chicago] Does anyone go to Facebook Developer Garage?
The New Pornographers
Another secret HN link found (the worst comments)
I for one welcome our new meta meta meta travel search engine overlords. :)

It worked really well for me. I loved the natural language search, one of the things that beats me down with travel search engines is having to select my date on their little calenders and then figuring out the airport codes of the airports I want to go into.

The 2 dozen browser tabs were pretty neat, on a low memory machine that might get annoying, but for my pc it was smooth.

One recommendation I have on the natural language sort is to have it recognize times of day i want to leave like morning, afternoon, etc
TouchLeague.com adds Custom/Private Leagues to Social Competion API
If you are going to create a new site in this space it has to be at least as good as Kayak. Tripeedo fails horribly. As others have mentioned, a site that simply opens numerous windows with the results from each site is not adequate.
Economics blogger Megan McArdle over at the Atlantic made the point a while back that politicians love recessions - their power grows, while that of the folks in the free market (their rivals) shrink.

Of course things in the metro DC area are good.

The flow of cash into the metro DC economy is larger than it's ever been.

The problems are out in the productive sectors of the economy.
European services, manufacturing shrink at record rate
While I'm sure that a human eye counts as an observer for purposes of collapsing quantum wavefunctions, I'm pretty sure that an inert brick of clay is, too.
But neither should they make you less sympathetic.
I agree with part of that. Look at the German LinkedIn competitor, which is a publicly traded company. It is the local leader, but that did not stop LinkedIn from moving in there. In the long run, the only strong brand is a global one. I do not see an opportunity for every region to have a successful me-too competitor.
agreed-- but until airlines open up their fare data via APIs, users can only truly get all data by actually searching individual sites. even meta-search sites like Kayak don't have access to all fares, which is why results often vary between the various sites. tripeedo is a step toward making that process more simple.
I would buy that bike, provided that it was not overly uncomfortable. The idea of a ultra-small folding bike is attractive to anyone who lives in a city.
It appears your career has caused you to take things with a much more relaxed pace and attitude, which IMO is an amazing thing. Being constantly worried and desperate is never going to end well, however it may end tragically soon but unless you're a professional artist that won't help getting famous.

I believe that living contentedly will produce a much longer and interesting life. Everybody on this planet works, and it always appears that people care more about what you do outside of work than what you ever did inside of work. For instance, I don't care if a doctor performed a 24 hour surgery to reattach a little girls hand, it's impressive but that's their job and they get paid for it.

You probably have lots of interesting stories from your work, but I don't care. I care about your acting. If I was talking to a professional actor, I wouldn't care about 90% of their stories, I'd care if they programmed on the side!
Apple is really good at this. They are always willing to obsolete their products if there is something else better. A great example is the iPhone. They didn't care that it would cannibalize iPod sales, because they knew the iPhone was the next move. If they didn't do it, someone eventually would shrewdly combine music + phone and beat them to the punch. By trying to constantly out do themselves, and make a better "iPod", they stay ahead of the curve, and make sure the sales always come back to Apple.

Steve Jobs is a big advocate of this. In hindsight it seems so obvious, but most companies just don't get it.
Seems funny to talk about IBM in this context but they did start out making punch cards in 1896. They successfully made the transition to computers, mainframes, and then PCs, but then finally missed the shift from hardware to software. From about 1896-1980 they were pretty on the ball, though.

Also AT&T has made the transition from fixed to cell phones, okay so far.

It's a lot easier when the new business has the same business model but new technology. When the business model changes along with the technology, often the established company doesn't view change as "profitable enough" and decides to fight the future. If you're curious about this "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a really good book.
It's asking me for a password and snubbing me when I don't have one.
On that topic, how do you handle the case where a user registers a dozen accounts and then uses them all to vote up his 'main' account? Are IPs tracked or something?

Or is this something I could find out by looking an the source you released for this site?
welcome,glad I can help
glad you like it, and thanks for the suggestion. time of day is a parameter we'll definitely be adding soon. (it's actually one of the trickier ones to implement).
At least we now know the words and phrases that can annoy the most individuals most of the time. The net-net is that it can be valuable. However, the bottom line is that it is a challenge to use them in a value added way.

My take away from this article is that its a space filler. It was a slow news day and/or his real news sources were out of pocket.

You know what I mean?

Oh well, if this is the worst we will have to deal with today, its going to be a good day.
Google shareholders lose that loving feeling
Now I see. I totally missed that...
Scientists claim big leap in nanoscale storage
Looking forward the new projects and coming articles
The half-life of an iPhone app
Well in normal English, 'or' is generally exclusive. The cat is black or red. (Generally understood that he is one or the other, not both.)

So, to me, 'and/or' is the English equivalent of the inclusive OR. The cat is black and/or red. (The cat may be black or red or both.)

Pretty sure this was discussed here a while back. (English boolean operators versus the programming kind.)

English Logic
and AND
or XOR
and/or OR

So yeah, I'd agree with you in that I think the author's banning of 'and/or' is wrong. Honestly the only ones that I agreed with were 6, 7, 8, and 10. I've never even heard people use several of the others.

One thing I hate is my current employer's culture of referring to people as 'resources'. I am not a lump of coal or a gallon of oil thank you very much. It took me quite a while to figure out that 'allocating resources' was a euphemism for 'reorganizing', which is itself a euphemism for 'firing some dead weight'.
Pay Homage to Paul Baran
Seriously doubtful. Zed may have had a website that featured him talking like a pirate, but I think it's pretty well known that he can code like a motherfucker.
It's "Will Felps", not "Wil Felps". The paper itself is in "Research in Organizational Behavior, Volume 27", Google Books preview of the paper is available here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=RKkxJnn73UoC&printsec=f...
Normally I'd agree, but in this case it is exactly what I wanted!
Awesome UI. I'm blown away.
I like the "Paint or die but love me" table. I think that one is really doable right? it's got 4 legs.
This site doesn't load in Chrome for me (aw snap error). Is anyone else getting that?

I'm running Chrome 2 on Windows 7.
The abuse protection code looks at a bunch of things. IP addrs are the easiest, but it also looks at others. Sorry I can't go into more detail.
I've never been one for team sports, preferring running, swimming and the like.

But I have read and will read anything written by Bill Simmons. The man is one of the great writers of our time. He's the Stephen King of sports writers, a guy who keeps pumping out solid, often great stuff that transcends his genre.

I don't follow football, but I read Simmons' picks during the season. I don't follow basketball, but I read his trade value column every year. Why? Because

-the guy explains it in an interesting way
-puts it in the proper perspective like you said
-links me out to great, great stuff I never would have found otherwise (like the greatest YouTube video ever: http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?section=magazine&...)
-is now living a bit of a glamorous, interesting life that's fun to experience vicariously
-can write like the devil

This is a guy who took a week to review the Karate Kid trilogy in detail instead of filing regular columns one summer.
http://espn.go.com/page2/movies/s/simmons/020830.html

And yet he attended a funeral for a young athlete who died senselessly, and wrote a "serious" piece that was moving, humble and very honest: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/0803...

There are writers who excel at structure, writers who are idea guys, writers who can nail little details, and then there are writers who simply have more firepower than the average man. They can write more, faster, and with more panache than 99% of the folks out there. It won't all be good, but it'll all be interesting. Simmons has a lot of firepower.

Which, to get back on topic, is why it's INFURIATING, that he's cranking out 3-4 podcasts a month and only 1-2 columns at this point. I simply can't listen to the podcasts. They don't fit into my schedule at all, in any way. I don't have an hour to stare at my computer while it plays an audio stream. Bring back the columns.
Meh, I disagree. I think prestigious universities have a reason to criticize sloppy/cliched/just plain annoying language. Did you not read Brave New World? The words we use are the thoughts we think.

I might agree with you though, on "take away." I find it annoying but it is less rude than the more straightforward, "What is your point?"
Key Quote -- "I’ve found that while I’ve moved on from the Rails scene, the scene has not moved on from me"

I wonder if he realizes he's paraphrasing Ronald Reagan?
Yeah, the truth is somewhere between that and the other theory that the overhead for internal communication goes at least quadratic with the number of group members, so a group of four looses 16/9 more of their productivity to internal friction than a group of three.

And all this is assuming you actually have a quantitative measure of programmer productivity that is accurate enough to measure a 30% change. But let's no go down that drain again.
How is it different from the freely available ab and httperf?

Refs:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/
No argument there. I didn't pay enough attention when we discussed it to find out if they're all working for govt or govt contractors, though I'm not.
From his site's source code, he's using YUI it seems, but there is one gem:

<!-- gotta have one somewhere :-) -->
<table border="0"><tr><td><h1><a href="/">Zed Shaw</a></h1></td>
<td width="100%"><h2>Enjoy the show.</h2></td></tr></table>
On the one hand I agree: I'd rather it popped up while I typed "Frankfurt, Germany" to let me disambiguate HHN and FRA, rather than open 20 tabs that all said "do not service that airport". I didn't realize HHN was the wrong code until nothing was found, whereas other sites (eg Kayak) let me disambiguate immediate.

On the other hand: not using a date picker is awesome. I've been using nl date parsing on my own sites lately and it's The Best.
Skidmore considers closing online degree program
FF3 and IE7's pop up blockers prevent access to search results. This is default browser behavior. How many people know or care about disabling pop up blocking for individual sites (or changing any defaults, for that matter)?
Working in the security field for some time now, and having dealt with malware infections myself, I have to admit he's probably right. Especially if you use the PC for serious purposes. Save your data on a separate drive, keep program installers archived, and you won't fear the re-imaging as much.
i need tehcnical support: on firefox 3 it first blocked pop-ups, so i enabled and got a spew of opened tabs with no search results found (see my other comment). when i tried to search again ff keeps blocking the pop-ups, even though i keep enabling them. !!! nuts, i really want to buy cheap plane tickets :P i'll keep trying.
Makes you wonder if they would have adjusted the strike price the other way had the stock risen, and my guess is they would not have.

I think any kind of adjustment of options past the date when the option is written, employee or otherwise should be forbidden.
Tripeedo has two obvious advantages over Kayak:

(1) It can help you search discount airlines like JetBlue and Southwest.

(2) It will show you fairs that are exclusive to the airlines' websites. (I don't think I've ever run into a situation where the airline's website had a price significantly lower than what was on Kayak but I've heard rumblings that it happens.)
This is cool. Thanks for the link.

I've read the comic about how 7-11 started in Japan. It was cool. http://www.dmpbooks.com/titles?n=26&t=59

Here's the link to project-x site... http://www.dmpbooks.com/titles?n=26&t=60
good developers were accepting pay too low before?

Yes, or rather: good programmers aren't always going for top dollar, but for interesting work. That prior behavior gives them two kinds of insulation from downward salary pressures:

- at an established job, they are already recognized as especially valuable, so less likely to be affected by compensation or job cuts

- if seeking new employment, they can marginally maintain income by sacrificing interestingness, if desired

On the other hand, a mercenary whose only criteria for accepting work was that it pays top dollar is especially vulnerable to economic pressure. Because of the winner's curse in auction processes, such mercenaries are likely to have been overpaid even before a downturn (and the companies overpaying them, likely to have been bubble creatures).
Every public school child in America deserves a healthful and delicious lunch that is prepared with fresh ingredients. Cash-strapped parents should be able to rely on the government to contribute to their children’s physical well-being, not to the continued spread of youth obesity, Type 2 diabetes and other diet-related problems. Let’s prove that there is such a thing as a good, free lunch.

Politely disagree. The article also states that the government is subsidizing school lunches to the tune of something like $2.57 for free lunches, $2.17 for reduced-price lunches, and $0.24 for paid lunches. It then states that most of this subsidization isn't even going into the school lunch program, instead it's going to "heat the cafeteria" or for "custodial services."

Utilities aren't free; nor are janitorial services. At first glance, it seems to be an accounting problem: incorrect cost assignments wrapped up with a budgeting problem.

One of the things we learn in managerial accounting is that variances (diffs. between "budget" and "actual") is that they are opportunities for improvements. Accounting for "free lunches" isn't free!
Fake it and show the results from the last test to that site.
I am really enjoying reading about this trial.

Usually when you put "geeks" on the stand, they immediately spill their guts, making the conviction trivial. (Example: Hans Reiser.) In this case, the defendants always have a clever reply for the prosecutor's "clever" question, which is making the prosecution's case extremely difficult. (Also making the case difficult is the silliness of the law, and the innocence of the defendants.)

My guess is that TPB has a really good legal team that prepared the TPB folks for all of the prosecution's questions. That is also good to see. Usually the people with worthy causes don't have enough money to defend themselves from the Big Bad Corporations, but in this case they do.

Finally, the prosecutor(s?) don't seem very competent about anything. The quote yesterday about DHT and being able to distribute torrents via e-mail seemed to really confuse them. (You mean TPB isn't actually making copyrighted files available? Damn, there goes our whole case!)
For the first time in history, more than half the world is middle-class
i don't seem to get the popups :(
I was reacting to his desire for more open source projects to have "a) a marketing plan and b) a visual identity and c) a site that was designed to sell the product", the trappings of something you have to sell to people. One of the things I love most about communal open source software is that you don't have to push it on anyone -- if they find it and like it, good for them!

git does benefit from network effect more than most software, but for a lot of itch-scratching open source projects, having the kind of end-users that are brought in by marketing is a negative. They require lots of help, which supports the introduction of middlemen, and drags on the developers until the community hits a critical mass.

Just having more users is not an absolute good, especially when they're the type of users you attract only with shiny marketing.
I had a frustrating experience with the site. Took me longer to get what I wanted than if I had gone to Kayak (the market leader) or Jetblue (that normally runs my best fare).

What, if I may ask, was the vision and rationale behind this approach?
How The Twitter Community Took on Facebook's Zuckerberg - and Won
Poll: How Has The Recession Affected You?
I was curious how much of an effect techies, hackers, and entrepreneurs have felt from the recession. It would be nice to hear stories too, if you have one.
None - The recession hasn't affected my work
Very Little - It's more my friends than myself
Some - I'm making less money/have less clients/harder to grow my startup
A lot - I lost my job/had to give up on my startup/in financial distress
Very nice. Are you guys using any off-the-shelf tools for the load testing, or is it all custom? (and if so, what language? Erlang?)

Also, is there a way to simulate more than 5000 users?
This issue is magnified when I didn't get the results I wanted. "Oops, we need to know more about your trip." Now I have n tabs to close instead of one.
I'd never thought someone would compete with Orbitz.
Why doesn't YC make a Hackerbook (HB) to facilitate nerd networking? I read HN cuz I can't stand digg et al. I might use HB cuz I can't stand FaceClutter...uh...Book.
Stimulus Package for Entrepreneurs?
What everybody else is doing is irrelevant
Jill Tarter: Why the search for alien intelligence matters (TED Prize winner)
I really like both the idea and the site.

One feature request that would have me signup in an instant is if you could provide web service load testing as well.

I'd also like to know more about the session recorder and if I can feed parameterized data into the scripts.
Who here, please, is claiming that TDD gets good results without knowledge, skill, understanding, and all the rest of it? Or that writing good code is easy?

Your infinite-regress argument would be entirely sensible if someone were claiming that all code written without testing it is entirely broken. Fortunately, no one is claiming that. In view of which, what you say is just like this: "How do you know that your reasoning about what the code needs to do is right unless you've checked your reasoning? And then how do you know your checking of your reasoning is correct unless you've checked that? Etc., etc., etc. Therefore, no one is really developing software by thinking about it."

TDD is not supposed to be an alternative to writing good, clean code, inspecting it and testing it. It's supposed to be a way of writing good, clean code. (No, that doesn't mean it's supposed to enable idiots to do that, or supposed to make it effortless.) Maybe it works well -- i.e., enables a person with a given amount of brainpower and a given amount of training and experience to expend a given level of effort and get better code -- and maybe it doesn't; but the objections you've made here don't make any sense.
We've Open Sourced Our Optimized VHD Support
I think there's also a lot of value in personalized recommendations.

i.e. Load increased with the following stress pattern, which can indicate an improvement is needed in areas A, B, and C.
How to beat out OptiPNG by one byte.
I am looking for your thoughts on policy that would stimulate entrepreneurship, particularly bootstrapping. I have proposed a set of ideas.
Most iPhone users never use an app after the first download