skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
API access is great, and there's a ton that could be done with that. (I've long had an idea that by arbitraging the popularity of an article across various networks, money could be made... your API could provide that data).

My app aims to be a kick-off service that allows users to jump to whatever web service they need to use at that moment... without me having to do any other work than pointing them to the correct URL... so I don't prefer the onus to be on me to create this functionality with your API :)

My own personal needs aside, I think the web-wide discussion of a URL is a pretty impressive and useful feature for general consumption... I really hope you include it.
Broken gets fixed; Shoddy lasts forever
IPhone App Store Reality Check - Candid Confessions of a Top-Selling App Developer.
DreamIt Ventures: "You Don't Need a Million Bucks to Start a Company."
According to TED.com, the video is supposed to be released within 24 hours.
The longer life expectancies are, the less offspring you have. Seems like a natural counterbalance.
how do you know you're going to work on it for google summer of code? the application for 2009 isn't open yet....right?
Too true. I like the optometrist who made me read tiny letters again and again instead of asking "better like this... or like this?" Because even I can't tell the difference at first sight.
Robo Rally
I found no transcript so I'll try a short summary, although I'm already forgetting the beginning.

Damien Katz worked on lotus notes, later he had a startup, from which he was fired. He started looking jobs but regular jobs didn't seem to interest him anymore. He believed he was a competent programmer, but felt that he could contribute more. He decided to live on his savings and build something before knowing what he was going to build. His wife liked the idea of living differently. He soon dropped his first idea which turned out to be horribly complex to realize. He then tried to somehow extract the essence of what was useful in lotus notes, leaving aside the unnecessary complexity, switched from c++ to erlang along the way, and ended up with couchdb. He was running out of money, so he took up a job at mysql, (although he had never used mysql, and barely knew sql). The development stopped until he took a break for the birth of his second (or third?) child, and brought couchdb to a point where suddenly ibm was interested in it. Negociating with ibm was so frustrating that he ended up calling them douchebags in a mail. This led ibm to agree that couchdb should be open source and to pay Damien Katz for working on it.

He says many more interesting and funny things.

I listened to it only once, without taking notes. Please correct me if I'm wrong. (I posted this on reddit also)
The fewer offspring you have, the less adaptable the species becomes.
Oldie but goodie: Herb Sutter's "Guru of the Week" articles on C++
i like when users can customize the results. eg, categories rather than a single popular ranking. there are some technical/performance issues to consider, but in an ideal world, my ranking could be customizable on:

* submitter karma or username

* number of comments, links in comments (and links should be shown in a toolbox so i don't have to scroll for them)

* max/mean comment karma

* submission domain

* submission key words or category

* popularity-newness continuum position

(edit: i keep forgetting how to make bullet lists, and help only tells me how to make new paragraphs. eit)
I made almost the exact same comment you made: http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/6oba0/its_ten_yea...
I don't think I'm able to communicate my point any better. Let's leave it at that.
No popped collars. Less SMS spam than Loopt. Lame.
Search 2.8M articles with New York Times’ API
Theoretically, prompt fiscal intervention could temporarily fund productive projects for timely general economic benefit.

Practically, politics means fiscal intervention arrives late, stays too long, and is targeted to reward favored groups and centralize power.

There's no separating the two without a magic wand to implement benevolent stimulus without a political process.
Look, I truly hate fear-mongering, and I see where you are coming from, but I'm not being a luddite here or arguing against science out of dogma.

I believe it's hubris to think we can change the fundamental natural order of things, and by fundamental order I am setting the bar extremely high. I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything else that qualifies in fact.

Of course that doesn't matter. If people can do it they will do it. But if I could place a bet I'd say it will do us more harm than good in the long run. That's all I'm saying, nothing more nothing less.
FriendFeed?
Go is a great game. I'm hoping I can coax my son to graduate from Chess to Go. Of course he's still pretty young so I'm not hurrying him too much.
How One Doctor Fights the Grim Spectre of Bleeding to Death
But how do you know they are jwesley's?
Because that wouldn't illustrate my point to the previous poster that improvements for road/rail will be to do with people and information, not so much cars or trains directly. :)

Why not use public transport?

- Because you don't know where it is. Enter technology to point you to a bus/train station. Enter GPS on your phone to guide you to it.

- Because you don't know which route / bus / train to take. Enter an open transit information system so your phone can tell you, on the fly.

- Because you don't know if this is the right bus/train to get on. Enter QR codes on the side of the bus so your phone can confirm it for you.

- Because you don't know which stop to get off at. Enter GPS on your phone to tell you.

- Because you don't know which ticket to get or if you have the right change. Enter your mobile and your phonebill or other integrated low-hassle small-quantity payment service.
I think the general idea is that in this situation people are reluctant to spend so the price of things goes down. In the general case that decrease in price would make spending more attractive, however people fear further price reductions and so still don't spend and you get a spiral that feeds itself.
Good point, but I would just add that evolution doesn't go away just because we are affecting it consciously. At best it just means we are responsible for our own evolution, which of course leads to the question, "do we collectively think it's best for reproduction to decrease and lifespans to increase?"

You've answered one way by citing the best and brightest. I would answer another way by saying that I think the best and brightest are outnumbered 100 to 1 by greedy individuals leveraging their wealth to consolidate power.
The answer to optimized bandwidth/encrypted data transfer in the cloud
That's only true if they're continuing to make poor investments. All we know is that lots of companies made poor investments in the past. Letting them fail doesn't change that past, nor does bailing them out necessarily reduce the quality of future investments.

If the person I originally replied to is implying that the current bailouts create too much of a moral hazard, then that's a possibility, but that one sentence that was given doesn't do the issue justice.
What impresses me most about this API is the richness of the data. Not just the articles, but publications times and keywords, thumbnails and more. A rich API just begs for rich applications -- say, the frequency of certain phrases graphed over time to show the rise and fall of cliches like "information superhighway" and "uniter, not a divider". Cool!
I think a good start would be to do some physical exercise...

Ah well, just give me this pill so i can live longer!
For you, not for the race.
His slides were terrible, they were impossible to read. He literally used a 12pt font to label his graphs.
Handling the most trickiest task in performance tuning of Java/JEE applications
Recreating the button
Cool!.Count me in your user count :)
I'm not sure if Go is in the intended category of "board games" as that term is being used here, but I must also recommend it.

Learning Go, I found all other games began to seem dull by comparison.
I was thinking of doing this about a couple years ago. The advantage for an independent company is you have more product and cost flexibility, thus getting your subscribers better deals. Also amazon's version is unflexible with the time periods which can cause problems. Fine tuning the delivery periods would be advantageous.

However, anyone I mentioned it to (all males, one female incidentally) thought it was silly.

I still think it has potential though.
Why don't they just use v8, tracemonkey, or squirrelfish? It's nice they continue to develop their own technologies (opera is awfully nice on cell phones), but, in this case, writing a js engine is a problem with lot's of pre-existing high-quality solutions with very active developer communities.

Opera writing their own next-generation js engine smells a little bit too much like not-invented here syndrome. Considering how small their market share is, it seems like this money could be much better spent elsewhere.
Cringley's argument rests upon the idea that Microsoft is driven too much by technology and not enough by usability. He says this is because features are owned by PM's who are technical, but I'm not going to engage that particular claim because I disagree with the first idea.

Windows' usability isn't bad. It isn't quite OSX, but if anything it is still easier for the majority of the population to stay with Windows because everyone knows it and is used to its quirks. The only "usability" problem in Vista I can think of that's big enough to be a game-changer is UAC. That's a combination of a legacy problem and an engineering problem (namely, previous versions of Windows weren't well engineered to be secure, and moving to a stricter model while maintaining backwards compatibility with apps accustomed to the looser model was bound to cause user experience headaches, unless they went a pure sandbox/VM route).

Look elsewhere in the company. Live search has fine usability but just isn't on par with Google technically. The XBox has excellent usability (and in particular was miles ahead of the competition in terms of an easy online gaming experience), but an engineering problem with the heatsink cost the company billions.

I'm not saying that technical issues are the root cause of Microsoft's problems either. There are many different problems but if I had to pick one to call the biggest, I would say a simple lack of innovation, both on the product and technical side of things. This lack of innovation is a contributing factor to two big problems:
1- Big customers are seeing fewer and fewer reasons to buy new versions of Windows and Office.
2- Microsoft is unable to execute on its traditional "fast follow" strategy where they do not create a market but are eventually able to build a product as good or better than the original innovators and then use their muscle to control the new market. Compare Microsoft vs. Netscape to Microsoft vs. Google.
The Audacity of Shamelessly Asking
can't you use google reader for this? Just make up some unguessable name for each group. No one could find the shared links unless they know the tagname. (Pretty sure, not 100%).

You can get anything into google reader. For instance you see something shareable online, then just use google notebook to save it to the appropriate tag.
A Haven for Spare Parts Lives on in Silicon Valley
> I wonder how it would work to preload the images for the initially visible part of a page and leave for later the ones that you must scroll to see.

Yahoo has an open source js library that does exactly that: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/imageloader/
Yep - keep it running all the time. Also look into emacsclient and emacs --daemon (with (server-start))
They have a tremendous peace corps presence due to governmental stability. There aren't many places that are both poor and safe for Americans.
Juicy Campus to Shut Down
Forgetting about the layout wars with the forces of table for a minute (forever, please?), this is a really nice use of CSS+JS. No images...impressive.
Aha.. I've seen the "interest rates can't go below zero" claim again. Is this really so? I've read it a lot, but surely a negative interest rate is possible by being paid interest to borrow money?

A negative interest rate, therefore, would be a bit like a formalized "helicopter drop". If the interest rate of a loan were tied to the nominal interest rate in some way, you wouldn't have millions borrowing as much as possible because the rates could well shift back in the other direction before long.
Back before it was a public project, there apparently was a Clojure on .net. It appears, however, that it is now pretty firmly matched to the JVM.

Given its present state, it would be about as hard to separate Clojure from the JVM as Java.

Perhaps someone will rip off its ideas and create L#.
This isn’t rocket science. Keynes suggested stuffing bills into bottles and burying them down mineshafts; Milton Friedman once proposed tossing cash out of helicopters. But as long as the government is spending money, we might as well spend it on something useful. And thus, fiscal stimulus.

I agree with printing money to halt the deflation. But this should not be done through government projects. If the money is spent via government projects, then you still get massive frictional unemployment as businesses shut down and and everyone has to find new jobs working for the government. Second, government spending has a ratchet effect. Government programs never die. Finally, I believe individuals know how to spend their money the best. Should money be spent on a high speed train from Boston to Washington, or should it be spent on healthcare? Just print money and give it to individuals and let each person decide.
How Businesses Can Use P2P
Being on the JVM is a very big deal. I have associates who wouldn't think of using a "fancy" language for anything, who are now looking closely at Clojure, and its chief attraction to them is evidently the JVM.

On the other hand, I like it because it is a "new/beautiful and novel language."
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to the new striving and suffering. And not merely "some day." Now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over.

- Erwin Schroedinger, My View of the World, 1964, p.21
Same question here. I didn't realize that they didn't. regular expression NFA and DFA algorithms are in every compiler book out there. I find it hard to believe that guido et al. didn't know about these algorithms.
Considering how anti-social most hacker-types are, maybe its better if you make it a session with a "purpose" instead, such as perhaps a gathering where each person gets to show everyone something you are working on.. (etc). Otherwise, gathering just for the sake of gathering doesn't sound appealing enough.

But if the event does go down, I'd be willing to show up.
I use Facebook much like I use LinkedIn: as a way for people to find me (and sometimes to find people I have lost touch with).

To keep my Facebook profile somewhat "alive", I have my Twitter account set to automatically update my Facebook status and I use the Wordbook plugin for WordPress to automatically post my latest blog posts to my Facebook Wall. Email alerts on Facebook are configured to notify me of the rare events when someone requests friendship or responds to my Facebook status, so I rarely even need to login.
You can never live forever. If we don't die of old age we will die accidentally. I imagine car accidents alone would restrict most people to a few hundred years.
Opera does it for the love of the game. They've got low market, an excellent product, and I don't know how they make money but they do.

Its great the opera mini gave my old cell phone a feel of a smart phone. And opera mobile supports flash.
Boy, 9, writes iPhone app
I hadn't noticed till now, but I actually shift my whole hand, using pinky and index finger. Hmm, maybe I should get out of that habit.
Let me be the first to say: http://is.gd/gw5L
Microsoft Needs to go Open Source
Both. There are a few things Facebook could do better, such as:

- Change the default privacy settings so that you can't see someone's pictures unless you're friends (discourages stalking)

- Change the default settings on the News Feed so that personal details are not broadcasted and give users greater control on deleting content easily. (encourages self-control)

- Allow some type of "auto-cleanse" feature to bulk edit large amounts of content (pictures, video, etc) to discourage unhealthy fixations (i.e media of ex-sig.others, spring break trips, nights of debauchery, etc).

But you are also right in that the user is part responsible. Some things I find helpful include:

- Setting up friend filters.

- Being cognizant of online sessions.

- Set a quota for wall posts, updates, profile changes.
Is Google Analytics Slow or Not?
Jwesley has 1 submission in his history. universitiesandcolleges.org.
I have a domaintools account that shows in the past it had the whois of "John Wesley"(it's on private whois now). But w/o the paid service,just to prove my point: Check the IP of the other domains I mentioned (abutterdish.com for example). Those both resolve to the same IP as universitiesandcolleges.org and are not on private whois. And what do you see as the registrant? "John Wesley". He's a fair amount of the domains on that IP actually.
I am sorry, I didn't understand what you've said. Can you please explain? (I really tried hard to decrypt it btw)
Depends on technological developments. Why should the individual survival machine care about the adaptability of the species as a whole?
Microsoft Kills Flight Simulator, Fires Entire Dev Team
High Pressure Yields Novel Single-element Boron 'Compound'
Thanks for your thoughts kth. If there's not much of a response, I will try posting again, and indicate a more focused purpose for the meeting.
I heard a rumor a few weeks ago that someone had Clojure running on IKVM. I'm sure it would be slow as hell right now; but it'd probably be OK for toying around with.
There's a much simpler explanation: the collapse of subprime mortgages forced people to confront the fact that there is way too much leverage in the economy. Too many people and companies owe money that they won't be able to pay back. The level of production of goods and services was based on the level of consumer and business spending, which everyone now realizes was being fueled by excessive debt. The level of production must now fall to a level that is consistent with businesses and consumers using much less debt going forward, and it will certainly overshoot on the downside because of panic and lack of information.

The question that I see being repeated in the media these days is "what are the banks doing with the bailout money, why aren't they lending it?" Perhaps the answer is that there is currently nobody out there who is a good enough credit risk to lend money to. Another possible answer is that the banks now realize that they've lost the ability to quantify credit risk correctly and they are going to need to relearn that skill.
Not available for the iPod Touch. Just like Loopt.

Yeah, yeah, I know Latitude says "soon".
If you're expecting the price to drop by 75%, 10% is negligible.
With Latitude, Google Fires Another Shot at Mobile Operators
I doubt you'll ever return to Sass, but I wanted you to know that we did take away that there's not really a good reason to force 1 style per line. We're going to add support for semi-colon delimited styles on the same line. No one has ever complained about it on the mailing list before...
Also if you did it db backed in a separate table, you'd have to do database joins to retrieve avatars, which might have a performance impact.
I don't know why but i laugh really hard at

"Instead of scouring my friends' friends' photos for other possible friends, I could have been raising money for Darfur relief"

One way for facebook to be a bit useful is to gain 1000s of "friends" and create a group or app to raise awareness or money for your cause.

I only have a handful of real friend so I don't feel ashamed of marketing to fb friends especially if it is for a good cause.
Ask YC: I'm looking to outsource an iPhone app, where do I find companies?
At my company we develop our own iPhone applications, but we have an application that we don't want to devote our resources to and would like to outsource.

I don't have any experience outsourcing and am not sure where to go to find a company in India/China/etc...

Does anyone have any reputable and good outsource company that they have used in the past?
Have you thought about publishing a subset of HN's data so others can experiment with it?
backgammon.

started playing it recently when i got a new job and the guys at my new firm play it. fun as hell.
I think that ought to be communicated a little better. It was immediately obvious from the site that you were selling something related to jellyfish tanks, but it was somewhat unclear who you were actually targeting with this. After a closer look, it seems that you are targeting mediumish businesses that already own and maintain a saltwater tank. I think that it would help if that target audience was more obvious right from the start.
well, at least real-estate prices would rise.
Incorporating Virtual Currencies in Non-Gaming Sites
I think I only made one comment on my first day. Perhaps this should be something that appears for an account's first X comments, where X is a sane limit. Perhaps a karma-limited reminder would be more effective for those who tend toward lurker. Then again, perhaps for the lurker class, that's ultimately unnecessary
NP, I'm actually glad someone is making an effort to do this.

Recently I've been making an effort to talk to more people (offline and real conversation) instead of being holed up in the CS lab coding all the time and its amazing how positive of an effect its having on my mood and creativity =)
Textbook regex algorithms assume that you're trying to determine whether a string matches an expression using a standard set of operators. Perl regular expressions have to match text to subexpressions, rather than just return a yes/no answer, and have a greatly expanded set of operators, some of which are completely incompatible with the usual NFA and DFA algorithms. It even lets you drop arbitrary perl code into the middle of a regex. You can easily write a perl regex that is NP-complete to match. You can't do that with the simplified regex language that textbooks talk about.
I don't believe it ever worked in Cocoa Emacs. It was a patch applied to the independently distributed Carbon Emacs.
> (Except the theme I'm using has very light colored comments, and I can't see them in 8 color terminal. Anyone have a suggestion for a 256 color terminal app?)

We had this discussion just recently:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443769

BTW, why do you pull from git://repo.or.cz/emacs.git
That might apply to Robert Martin, but Kent Beck's on record as saying don't unit test getters and setters. "Test everything that could possibly break."

So, strawman.
Amazon Under Investigation By U.S. Postal Service
Stay away from Aquamacs. It is for all intents and purposes, Emacs, but with all the useful stuff watered down in an attempt to make it fit in better with Mac OS.

My config is here: http://github.com/wfarr/dotfiles/
The reason that managers do what they do to developers is because a manager does not have to think. Because of that, he has no understanding of what kind of environment supports or destroys one's ability to think. He sees his job is to make snap decisions based upon no information and, as a consequence, thinks that your job too.