skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not that it devalues the article, but just FYI the researcher mentioned

http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/index...

has been doing press in the last some months with regard to his book

http://scienceofloneliness.com/?q=homepage [all Flash site]

http://www.wpr.org/book/090201b.cfm [archived show is Real format]

http://wpr.org/kathleendunn/index.cfm?strDirection=Prev&... [archived show is Real format]

As for loneliness itself, I tend to be towards the high end (in more quantity that desired) of social isolation. My anecdotal experience is that it does become self-reinforcing and that it does, in this circumstance, diminish life experience including my perceived neurological function.
Still hard to believe the usual things (health, love, money) don't affect one's happiness much.

But maybe something else matters more. I wonder if the researcher has the data on:
1) Does a sound marriage affect one's happiness?
2) If attitude is everything, does that make real difference?
dr @applcnt, thx! ur grt, othr ppl too - got smbody else, but maybe ttyl!
Minds < species is a real biological mind grenade.
I also have performance problems on Ubuntu 8.10 in Firefox 3. The clouds moved jerkily and the buttons were somewhat unresponsive.
AFAIK TN-based displays are 6-bits per color, i.e. (2^6)x3 total output, not sure if that's a limitation of TN technology or just an unfortunate tradition.

But that is a technology-based comparison, rather than a performance-based comparison. There are no intrinsic reasons

I clearly see an abrupt color cut-offs in smooth skin gradations when working in Photoshop unless my head is positioned perfectly [speaking of MBP, arguably the best TN-based laptop LCD]. So... intrinsic reasons or not, I haven't seen a usable TN-based display yet.

W700 costs almost 3 grand. For that kind of money I don't need yet another "best TN laptop display", something like my 6-year old 17" Samsung with a true 8bit panel will do.
do you think a chimpanzee carrier makes it okay to inflict

What is the test for "okay"?

okay to inflict (with reasonably high likelihood) mutations and health problems on animals you are expecting will have near-human, or even human, levels of intelligence?

They could be aborted, instead, by not carrying out the project. http://news.google.com/news?q=abortion+birth+defects

In the process, an entire race of humans, or near humans, would also be aborted. http://news.google.com/news?q=racial+genocide
Meh, good comments tend to rise to the top without orange names. And with threaded comments it doesn't make much sense to jump around to orange users, so I don't see much point.
DocVerse: A Startup Fixes Document Sharing for MS Office
check these terms out .... deduplications and wan optimization
To Help People Choose, Sometimes You Have to Eliminate Choices
This article is well worth the read.

This is a perfect example of what makes history fascinating - its ability to make sense of the present and the future.

His conclusion, for those who can't get through it: housing is a dead end investment. It's a liability, not an asset in economic terms because it discourages mobility and doesn't have good (any?) returns. We should abolish policies that promote each man his own home, encourage renting, and come up with housing infrastructure solutions that are economically stimulating (in terms of mobilizing the workforce and bringing talent together).

The housing market seems ripe for technological innovation. Any ideas?
Oh, it is very clearly Drupal. That was not the intent of the comment. The intent of the comment was that it is Drupal, and thus Blue State Digital (the BarackObama.com web vendor) was not behind the construction of the site.
Because you don't have to teach it, it just learns.
Though Google shows the shortest route by default, you can drag the line to select alternate routes, and the instant updating suggests the other paths are already locally loaded. So their APIs may already provide (or leak) enough info for you.

But even if they don't, you can probably buy the same data from their source or another provider. (See that little 'Tele Atlas' copyright at the bottom of Google Maps? Or 'NAVTEQ' at the bottom of Yahoo Maps?)
This is a good deal, but I think that Go Daddy's inclination to shut down controversial websites makes it less attractive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Daddy#Controversies
Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes
has been posted previously. Fantastic article on Economics of Geography.

I've spent a lot of time trying to map out the world with data and I've come to the same conclusions: Boston-Wash-NYC corridor (I would almost count in Toronto and Montreal as adjacent to it; I guess, then you could just simply call it the industrial Northeast), Pacific Northwest, Northern continental Europe (Northern France, Belgium, Netherlands, Northwest Germany). I also like the Southern Germany-Austria-Switzerland-Northern Italy cluster. The London cluster is overpriced IMHO, but still has excellent public schools. California seems overpriced and the state budget is in bad shape.
Uh oh, you may have found the secret to most enterprise software companies success.
The problem, really, is that Apple no longer sells a professional laptop

Unless your profession is laptop tinkering, this statement is absurd.

Clearly Apple believes that more "pro" users would rather have more power in their lone battery
than the opportunity to swap (and carry) multiple batteries.

This certainly matches my experience.
I'm a developer who uses my Mac both at home and at work and I'm on my third Apple laptop at the moment.
I spend 8-10 hrs a day on my laptop and I have never needed to use a second battery.

if you can't swap out the battery on the go and replace its hard drive with minimal hassle, it's definitely not "pro"

I have upgraded the memory and hard drive in every one of my laptops so I can understand this reaction but
it really needs to be thought of as a cost-benefit problem.

A lighter and stronger case benefits me over the entire life of the laptop whereas easier access
to the upgradable components saves me 45 minutes on the one or two occasions I am upgrading them.

That seems like a good trade-off to me.

The glossy, low-gamut, sub-HD LCD panels on most Apple laptops, however, continue to disappoint.
Getting threatened with a lawsuit is not a good thing. I'm not sure you can go through this for real and be cavalier about it.

Otherwise, good article.
i got it to go past 4000 BC. any idea when it ends?
After having worked in the industry for 8 years, I'd have to say that programmers DO try to make a project "interesting". Now this is not just for kicks, its usually for :
1. Not having to learn and use the homegrown piece of sheet solution.
2. To use something that has been used by others elsewhere ie somethings that is already battle proven.
3. To learn something on the job.

The older you grow, the more important number 3 becomes. At least that has been my experience.
I'm pretty sure Google uses a variant of Dijkstra's algorithm by default.

Here's a thread where they go through how to use Dijkstra's manually with the GMaps API:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/browse_thread...
Ask HN: What can I improve in this demo video?
Ask HN: Please review my web-app - Shopialize.com
Do you think this video is clear (message wise)? Is it too long? Boring? Does the background sound add to the video or is it a distraction?
Here's the link to the Dec 2008 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society that this article is in response: http://www.ams.org/notices/200811/index.html
Inheritance as Antipattern
Promising tech startup casualties
Hi HN, I've been working on http://shopialize.com application in the part-time since quite some time now. I'd really appreciate your feedback, critique comments, suggestions to improve, or new ideas to take this to the next level.

I'm not explaining what, why, and how aspects of this web-application here because I want to see how much of it is clear from the website itself. So please visit http://shopialize.com, explore different pages and let me know what's your first impression.

I understand that there are many social components that need to be developed for the viral distribution of this application like Facebook, OpenSocial and iPhone apps. But first I wanted to release the core idea and learn what exactly people want, so that I can continue building this application from their feedback.

Believe me, this is just the beginning - so please - pour in your thoughts and ideas about how you want to improve the social shopping experience on the web. You can also email me at aditya@shopialize.com.

Thanks, Aditya
Ah. Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification. I've learned a lot about these kinds of web sites from your submissions/posts, keep 'em coming!
I liked knowing what the numerical criteria for orange display of usernames were set at. That allows me to check my own contribution to HN along another dimension besides raw karma count.
Actually:

Really old way I did things: No cart at all, used matrix of buy-it-now buttons.

Old cart: Lightbox style (gray out the background, box in the middle), ajax shopping cart which takes two seconds to open and is a little cluttered in some use cases. Beats above option by lots.

New cart: Lightbox, feels-like-AJAX (everything is pre-loaded so that opening a new DIV or recalculating prices is essentially instantaneous -- no HTTP request involved), instantaneous response and no clutter. Beats old cart by lots.
"'The only way to block your number after this is released is to use Spoofcard,' he says with a laugh."

One company, two synergistic products.
Keynesian video games! Awesome.
You're looking at it too literally. A grid is meant to be a basic visual system -- a framework in itself really -- that brings order to 2D design and usually gets obscured by graphics. All of these are based on exacting grids: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/trends/best-of-css-design-200... some more apparent than others. Of course, the value of a framework of a framework is another question.
ehh, this is just (questionable) formatting. After you use python for a while, the __methods__ should become pretty common-sensical (and seeing the actual __name__ is more useful if you're trying to reimplement protocols common objects support). That and not being able to manipulate the output of see() makes it pretty useless.

I personally like doing things like [f for f in dir(o) if 'foo' in f] etc.
I haven't done a lot of research on this but don't they use a few metrics other than just the basic distance between the two end points? I would think it is a weighted average of a few metrics. Distance, average time(they have traffic data), number of stop lights, etc....
This is a cry of a coder. Monkey coding without an idea and model and plan is hard, for sure.

Just try to write a little article or an essay, leave alone a business plan.

It is impossible to draw a big picture from left-up corner, as matrix printer does.
Slashdot | Facebook Scrambles To Contain ToS Fallout
Great news. More programs like this, the better the startup climate around the local area and the industry as a whole.

Anyone have an idea if YC, TS, LaunchBox, etc type sessions exist here in NYC? I'd be very interested in working with someone to make it happen. Feel free to drop me a line.
Me, too. And congratulations -- finding a 100% increase lurking on your site is pretty huge. I hope you find more. And make sure you let us know about 'em!
maybe young people see it as a single failure. most people over the age of 30 know better.

besides, what is the punishment model of our democracy? voting the other party in? yeah, that works.

I vote for a return of the public gallows.
Where are you at? If you're in NYC, let's grab a beer sometime. (Anyone else reading this, feel free to take the offer as well. Beer is good.)
I don't think they were trying to hide the identity of their CMS. It seems more likely that they were just tidying up by removing pages that weren't part of the plan, or didn't want to have draw attention to new content in such a plain and uncontrolled way.
fMRI technology (which allows us to see what part of the brain is used during cognitive processes for those who didn’t read the article) is going to be one of the bigger items in the future and while I find the research interesting I’m not sure what it necessarily proves. It’s fascinating to see how these people’s brains are working but as a society what we’re really looking for is the cause of that activity. Are they born that way? Do their brains adapt over time? Etc...

That’s the real relevant question. Martin Lindstrom wrote a book about his experiments with fMRI technology in trying to determine buying trends (http://www.amazon.com/Buyology-Truth-Lies-About-Why/dp/03855...) and to be honest I didn’t find the conclusions he reached much more compelling than those that people had reached without an fMRI.

I guess what I’m saying is that using the fMRI is like the Neanderthal watching a tornado. He can see it but he doesn’t understand it or know how to avoid it yet so that information is of limited use. Still a step forward for him, but not by all that much.
Thank you.

In my entire existence as a business I have never seen someone by X licenses plus Y [license plus CDs], and indeed even explaining the difference to my customers would be tricky. So I opted to make it impossible -- if you ask for 5 copies of the software via download you get five copies, if you then ask for the CD instead it will set you up for 5 copies and 5 CDs.

The cart actually remembers everything that you've put into it within the current page, even if you close the lightbox. If I wanted to save it there are options but a) dirty hack and b) most of my customers have no need for it.

Your sample size is also quite low (94% increase = from 8 conversions to 15), and you're using absolute values in the graphs. Did traffic to the page stay constant over all that time?

That last question appears to demonstrate a misconception about A/B tests. I did not test the old cart serially with the new cart -- I've done that sort of thing before, but the results are automatically suspect because factors other than the variable you're testing are constantly changing. An A/B test tests the old cart and the new cart at the same time -- when you open purchasing.htm Google flips a coin and cookies you up with the results. Heads you get the old cart. Tails you get the new cart. No matter how many times you go back you get the same cart (until I terminate the test, obviously).

This means that I'm able to have confidence in the results despite this week having traffic far above my typical values, due to Valentine's Day. (Certain holidays are almost always good to me. Why is outside the scope of this post.)

The sample size was not 8 or 15, incidentally. It was two groups of over a hundred (prospects, not customers). While I'd prefer groups of over a thousand for the obvious reason that it implies I'd sell ten times more software, in stats terms that doesn't make the experiment more valid, it would just decrease the size of the confidence intervals by roughly a factor of sqrt(10), and it might also increase the confidence in the significance test (that was the second 94% value, see the writeup).
SAP is a brand. It's all about sales, not software, which actually is a terrible mess.

And of course it is an ecosystem, where you must pay for every little step. It is much worse than MS.
The land of puritans is filled with a whole lot of Irish Catholics. So I am sure their isn't a shortage of beer after midnight... the pubs/bars stay open late! and another plus is u will meet drunk college girls1
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/by/senthil

second one, simple - effective
Xbox Walkthroughs
Find out the best sites for Xbox Walkthroughs
Anecdotes aren't data, I know, but I've been in NYC for 2 weeks now, have had something to do with people I like more than half the evenings I've been here, and I'm still starting to feel the weight of the city. I'm coming from SF, where I went out far less often, but I somehow didn't feel lonely at all in that town.

I think the big difference here is that it's just so in your face, how much of a bubble everyone keeps around them when dealing with strangers and casual acquaintances, but also how warm people can be when they let someone in. It's harder than I expected to hear people laughing loudly with each other on the subway, or to walk past crowded restaurants in the cold, even when you just came from that situation yourself.
You may be interested by my blog (see profile), which is essentially 2.5 years of "I did X and got a 2%, 5%, 25% lift" or "I did Y -- sucked, reverted". Granted, most of them are not in nearly so much detail and when I was starting out my approach lacked rigor. Heck, it still does in a lot of ways.

Some random notes:

1) Linking non-technical users to an image file is like asking them to please leave your site. Since I had a prominent image on the front page, replacing the direct link with a lightbox resulted in about 10% decrease in bounce rates.

2) I used to use quiet, understated buttons in my sidebars and on my download page. My friends derided them as "big pancake buttons" when I started, and it has sort of become my design trademark: they're now MUCH bigger. (I think the ideal size is about 800x600 but I've never been quite brave enough to test.) +25% conversions.

3) The first textual link in copy gets clicked on more than any other textual link in the page. Make sure it leads to a high value page (in my case, download free trial) rather than a low value page (in my case, screenshots -- I think, its been a while).

4) I just learned this two weeks ago: if you have copy which takes up impressive vertical space with a button at the top and a button at the bottom for God's sake put a button at appropriate points in the middle. +10%
you should really think about changing the name. You are pretty much killing your word of mouth referrals since everyone will go to shopalize.com
The image clearly shows that the result is statistically insignificant. This is very important as you could be misguided. The general thumb of rule for running full factorial A/B test (like the ones GWO does) is that you require about a baseline level of million page views with about 5% conversion rate in order to get successful results in one week (including weekends).
It was developed almost 30 years ago. It's based on technologies from 80th. It's don't scale. It's have no community. support. It will cost you a fortune for pre-start, a fortune for make it work, and a fortune for thousand hours of sly consulters and fake trainers. It's for medium business.

For medium-size business its much cheaper to hire some pros who will make analysis of your business processes and build something based on modern technologies. The distributed computing is already mainstream with several OSS codebases.

Of course, if you're Boieng or Citi Group there are no alternatives.
Cacioppo, one of the nation's leading scholars on
loneliness, has shown that loneliness undermines health
and can be as detrimental as smoking

If they saw a correlation between loneliness and bad health, it does not necessarily mean that the former caused the latter. Perhaps sickly looking women are more likely to be lonely?
What differentiates this from all the other social shopping sites out there?
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll ponder over it. I tried buying that domain before, but the deal didn't go through. I'll try to find a catchy and easy name.
Even if you prove that a program meets a formal spec, there's no way to know that the formal spec does what you 'intend'. And specs can get complex too.
HN User Style
Fallout? It's not fallout when facebook users use facebook to protest.

Why do people expect privacy in a website in which one's goal is to display their vanity to everyone?
About to say the same thing. Of course, a name won't make a break you at the outset but it can certainly help.
I actually think you can do a lot better than the code he posted, for the problem he posed. The business logic there is not explained, and drowns in a sea of repetitive method names and excessive punctuation. Here's a version of the code that includes a lot less "noise" and includes references to the applicable regulations and regulatory agencies, which I made up for the purpose of this exercise.
I've also removed the original comments, because they simply restated verbatim what the code said, as a sort of acknowledgment that the code wasn't as readable as it should be (although I didn't think it was so bad as to require comments).

# [`supplemental_documents` probably isn’t the only business rule
# that depends on whether something is a corporation or not, so
# I’m factoring that out here to make the code more readable than
# it was in the DailyWTF exercise. -kjs]
def is_corporation(self):
return self.orgStatusCode == 'CORP'

def supplemental_documents(self):
"""Yield the form numbers of the supplemental docs §801.33 requires.

The NNDDA imposes some special legal requirements because we
are not a DDTL under §701.2.

"""

# §801.33(b)(2)(ii)
if self.stateCode in ('AZ', 'TX'):
yield 'SR008-04X'
yield 'SR008-04XI'

# §801.33(b)(4) (as amended 1998)
if self.ledgerAmount >= 500000:
yield 'AUTHDLG-1A'

# §801.33(b)(8)(i)
if self.coInsuredCount >= 5 and not self.is_corporation():
yield 'AUTHCNS-1A'

def attach_supplemental_documents(self):
"""Attach supplemental docs a customer filing requires under §801.33."
for doc in self.supplemental_documents():
self.attachDocument(doc)

I don't think the "self." is an improvement here, but despite that, I think the code that actually contains the business logic is a lot more readable this way.

Really I think that if your notation for these business rules imposes much more overhead than this, it will be easy to overlook ways that they don't say what they're supposed to say. You don't need to have reams of repetitive, highly-compressible code just because you're doing business applications.

The DailyWTF author scoffs at the idea that "end-users" should write business logic, somehow confusing business-logic DSLs with expert systems. I think that at the very least, you should write your rules in a notation that enables the end-users to understand what they say. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to build a business-logic DSL for things like this, but in this case I think Python might work just as well.

(In fact, the DailyWTF author seems to assert that writing a DSL parser is of equivalent difficulty to compressing random data. For what it's worth, a parser is a lot easier to build than an expert system, but I got news for you, Alex. There are actually working expert systems in the field, there have been for nearly 30 years, and people are building more of them all the time. They don't require any pixie dust or unicorns.)
The overall point to this article contains some truth but I came away with the impression that "tech" people and "biz" people are somehow genetically different. Either one, in reality, can learn to do the other one but it takes time, practice and lots of mistakes.

As a tech person learning how to sell in the last year, I've made many mistakes and learned a lot. Aside from on-the-job experience, one book that I recommend is The New Solution Selling. This is probably more applicable in the enterprise sales world (where I do most of my work), but it's a fantastic place for tech people to start.
With a King’s Ransom in Cash, Why Is There Still No Buying Spree in the Tech Space Yet?
Pricing experiments with Fog Creek Copilot