skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where do you print brochures?
We're going to a conference and need to print brochures. Can anybody recommend a good printer? We've used OvernightPrints.com for our business cards and they're great, but they can't print 11x17 brochures.
For this to be in a library, I'd want it parameterized by the random number generator. (After being convinced it's really worth it.)
You're holding up social security as the pinnacle of efficiency, without a citation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

The link says social security is short 7 trillion dollars of 2008 money to pay for its obligations over the next 75 years. 7 trillion dollars is a lot of money... Whatever the reason this happened, doesn't it indicate the less Government the better, to lower the risk of them losing trillions of dollars?
Issue being that how can anyone answer those two questions without understanding the problem he/she is attempting to solve?

It very well might be the only way to solve the issue given external constraints, but it may also be the case that, for example, reworking the problem space would lend itself to a much more elegant solution.

Code should never be treated as if it exists in some sort of bubble.
Here's a simpler secret:

Create more value for the customer than it costs them and than it costs you to produce.
On Windows, I use Bitvise Tunnelier and the SSH tunnels/connections always keep retrying if there's a disconnect. For the terminals, I just use screen so I can get right back to what I was doing, but it is annoying to lose all those consoles if I had a bunch open.
I think that may be just the difference between rural and urban.

The huge wealth gap between the two is present everywhere.

The totals may be different but the gap is approximately the same in both the industrialized and the non-industrialized world.

Except that some part of the world (Japan?) just don't have any rural left!
I've never seen them have this many issues before... what's going on over there?

They had the problem with the malicious site tags a few weeks and now this. These are major outages... what's changed?
Ask HN: New links queue almost at 24 hours, what now?
Do you think the new links queue is filling up too fast?

It's almost at the point where #300 (the last one) is less than 24 hours old. S/N ratio is starting to drop and I'm finding many 2-3 point things buried away that are gems.

That is not to say that the rankings should be perfectly suited to my tastes, but that as the new queue gets bigger and more unmanageable it becomes less scrutinized by voters (since time is a finite resource).
My only thought is to think about limiting submission rights to a certain/higher karma threshold.
Southwest Airlines' newest competitor: Cisco telepresence
Lambdas pretty much suck because there has not been a good brace-free syntax proposal, There was a pretty good proposal for a where clause a couple of years ago, but it doesn't seem to have gotten any traction, probably because it was not made into a PEP (see python.org about PEP's).

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_threa...
ID == given any set of conditions, the cause of those conditions may be natural or an external agent (or a combination) ID presumes an external agent.

Arguments for ID include complexity and the watch, etc. Application of ID may mostly be by religious people.

But ID itself is just common sense. You make an observation -- have a perception. You acknowledge that you either 1) believe you understand everything about how that reality occurred, 2) believe you understand a little but one day will understand everything, 3) believe that agencies unknown to you created that perception and the true cause lies in another set of facts unknown to you. (eventually understandable or not)

Maybe I'm missing something, but that's how ID theory looks to me.

To make a factitious example, lizard people from the planet Xypton diverted an asteroid millions of years ago and killed the dinosaurs. The fall of the dinosaurs has an ID basis then. But I doubt we'll see a lot of lizard people churches anytime soon.

It's just basic epistemology.
Call for EU intervention in browser war is troubling
Ha! Generating a provisioning profile is more than eight steps(!) in itself.
“New York, New York” moments and getting one shoe on
At the moment, it's not even possible to download and install MySQL anymore.

I was setting up a Wordpress install a week ago, so I headed over to MySQL.org and hit the download link. They won't let you even download it without having your company "Reviewed" these days. So I filled out my info and was told I'd hear back when they were ready.

That was a week ago. No word back. I still can't even download it.

I could never understand anybody would use MySQL for anything business critical. Now it seems that nobody is allowed to use it for anything at all.
Real article here: http://launchlab.co.uk/article/Entrepreneurial-Columnists/Bi...
Here's another side of the story from someone who jumped on board the AppStore this summer.

http://appcubby.com/blog/files/the_experiment.html

Less kool-aid, more reality.
Behind the Scenes at MySpace.com
Microsoft lends rival Google a license for Sync
So you would've thrown out Aaron Swartz's young face? (Aaron co-founded of Reddit)
Immaculate prosthetic limbs
I think it's just a post he's using to drive traffic and mock people for his own entertainment. I think any serious idea posted in the comments would probably get deleted.
Book About Air-Filtering Plants: How to Grow Fresh Air
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html

You may have been trying to download the enterprise version.
I think that would help reduce the volume and increase S/N. To address the hidden-jems problem, another idea would be to randomly serve up the second page (Page 2 of the front page), giving the hidden-gems a better chance to make it to the first page.
I tend to go back and forth with this. I read the entire book but stopped doing the exercises at some point and focused on the project I wanted to do. I think it's good to have an overview so when you do run into some problem it may trigger your memory about something you read so you can easily find the documentation you need, but nothing really replaces coding.
How do you innovate around a potential monopoly like this? If ticketmaster starts becoming more like a scalper in its operations, then the secondary ticket market becomes pretty useless. Or, do the ticket prices just increase even more in the secondary market.

Normally, I'd say this would make ticketmaster RIPE for disruption, but they're the gatekeepers. You can't get tickets any cheaper than what they sell them for. If they also interlock with the record labels, it's going to desperately slow innovation in the music industry around concert tickets and alt. revenue sales.

Thoughts from the ticketstumbler guys?
This is becoming more of a problem now. It is impossible for new stories to get as much attention now as when the site first started, but historically there really haven't been many good stories missed.

This Ted talk failed to really make the front page twice. It must have briefly been on the front page but it takes so much more weight now to actually hold that position.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474875 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473821 I would encourage you to look for more examples of good stories that have not made the front page; this is the evidence that pg has said is needed to show that there is actually a problem here.

Time limiting submissions may help a little, though I haven't noticed people mass submitting middling articles. What we need is some time of cultural incentive to read the new page, and pages 2/3/4 of the new page.
After seeing Walter Isaacson on the Daily Show last night, I couldn't help yelling at the TV. The thing that I really wish someone had asked (and was alluded to in this op-ed) is this:

What do you do about the entire generation reaching adulthood who has _never_ had to pay for news?
What you are describing is already done as a news magazine. Take away the immediate snippets of news and focus on indepth stories? Well, now you are running another Time, NewsWeek, Economist, etc..

How are those businesses doing?
According to the article, NYT revenue last year (a bad year) was $1 billion.
Several typos in the article and with a CTO quoted as saying things like "Smalltalk is very similar to C", My alarm rings.

The 8 steps are not wrong, although simplistic. Most importantly, I would reorder the list and move point 5 "Sign-up as an official developer" to the very top. Sign up, pay the money and finish the procedure for tax-withholding, if applicable. Do that from Day ONE. It looks like it takes Apple to finish the contract paperwork in days for some developers, but up to months for others. It took me 3 months, with no ETA, with 2 applications approved and me sitting there like a lame, frustrated duck.
Drag and drop your widgets in a portal with Shindig and Dojo
The thing that strikes me the most is how dated this is already. Tagging -- the novel concept it introduces at great length -- won, and all the motivating arguments for it just seem obvious now.

Obviously, that's not a criticism of the piece itself, which is very good. It's just so (... quickly look up date ...) 2005.
I'm not a fan of the phrasing, but "get the user laid" is often cited.
I think that the reason it's only 6 million is that everyone else is just using facebook. I use twitter/identi.ca to have conversations, ask questions, "microblog" but when my posts get pushed to facebook, my friends have no idea what I'm doing.

In other words, maybe the best way for someone to take down twitter is to create a compelling reason to not use facebook's status feature, and instead use the next new thing.
The problem is they didn't follow the first step.

And yes, that is what I'm suggesting, that newspapers evolve into daily news magazines, albeit online. I understand that there won't be enough room for all the existing brands in this space, especially with focuses that aren't local. Such is the harsh reality of the free market.
Introducing d-SCI
d-SCI
The Digital Scientific and Surveillance System.

About: A sophisticated network diagnostics and analysis tool

After hearing about google's mlab effort, I decided to put together a prototype that can provide a front-end to the data that mlab produces. After considerable thought about how to extend the d-SCI platform, I realized that this can be a valuable network tool all in itself. However, my reason for posting is that I'm looking for other hackers (and of course potential co-founders) that are located in NE Ohio to maybe talk and code with. I'm specifically looking for people with fairly advanced knowledge of TCP/IP and network programming who are ready to build the next generation of networking tools. The prototype is limited in functionally, but it at least shows you what direction I'm headed with this type of software.

Prototype: http://krenz.tastyspleen.net/geolocate/
I wrote something like this back in the days before browsers reliably implemented cross-domain security models. I could see where each visitor on my site went in real time subsequent to their visit, chat with them, and redirect them to new pages. Enabled some interesting conversations.
US Senate approves $838 billion stimulus bill
May I suggest sinatra? It's built to provide web services with way less complexity than rails.
call me old fashioned, but I still use my browser to view RSS. I skim the headlines as a live bookmark and go to the actual post if interested.
I'm sorry, it was a bad idea to bring up Social Security. My only point was that the management of the legal requirements for the organization are very very small relative to the amount of funds that are flowing in and out.

I do agree that there are fundamental flaws in the Social Security System and I have said many times, though not here, that I will gladly pay into social security and never receive any benefits. I don't see any other solution and I am volunteering to take the hardship.

If enough people join me, we can fix social security. Like a balloon that slowly deflates through controlled exhaustion...
How The World Almost Came To An End At 2PM On September 18
Yes it seems you're right. I misread the rule. Now the proposal appears much more logical. Thanks for making this clear, you get my upvote.
Home Theater News
More people are using home theater entertainment centers in their homes. That's because these centers are great in that they create movie theater style experiences in the home with great picture quality and amazing sound quality for the home.
The point is, Sizzle doesn't solve a problem for them. John Resig suggested to -replace- their CSS selector engine with Sizzle, not to use Sizzle in place of building their own.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...

This is Ebert's review of Touch the Sound, which is a documentary about a deaf percussionist.
I still think some people will pay for quality news reporting. Maybe not the crap that seems to pass for journalism in a lot of publications these days. If you provide people with well-researched information, give them access to people/places/things they couldn't otherwise reach, you will be providing some value which you can charge for.

If you are just doing lazy, surface level reporting on things that a horde of citizen-journalists are going to throw onto the web for free anyway, you might be screwed.
Yes. But this cost is passed on to customers ultimately. Utilities have to build new power plants, and if the plants are for peak generation, they are ridiculously expensive (they turn on quickly).
From what I have heard, the plugins work pretty well. Also, the postgres team has decided to integrate some replication into the core codebase so expect some change on that.
Definitely! I found the article doubly interesting because 1) I worked in a library through college* and remember finding such skews in organization rather odd, and 2) while he doesn't have any programming-specific examples, it also shows why trying to fit everything into a hierarchy of classes tends to involve a lot of awkward workarounds in any sufficiently complicated (i.e., real) system.

I don't have a CS degree (history, actually), but I wonder if, when cliche examples such as e.g. Animal -> Mammal -> Dog/Cat/etc. was presented ("See! You can fit things into a tree. OO simulates the real world!"), somebody had the foresight to ask how things like monotremes are represented. (Hopefully without being smug about it - it's an important question, far too important to just be a chance for That Guy to be a smart-ass.)

Library and information science professionals (e.g. catalogers) understand the enormity of the issue better than most programmers, in my experience. There's a lot of room for cross-pollination of ideas there.

* Which was a great combination, btw.
Questions of grammar, usage & style encountered by writers/editors
7 trillion / 75 on the other hand is less than 100 billion a year. There are some other ongoing programs I could mention to put that number in perspective.

Also, while Social Security may be short now (or in the first break-even year, 2013 or so depending on who you ask, but even then the program won't be broke, it will just be spending more than it receives) for demographic reasons it will be long later for the same demographic reasons.

The larger problem of debt forecasting over an even shorter time horizon (remember when we had a ten-year surplus of trillions, at the end of Clinton's second term) makes me dubious that even your 7 trillion number will be accurate.
Actually that's not true. Functions in Ruby aren't first class citizens, and for a given function you can't request / modify it's syntax tree.

Otherwise, I consider the blur between code and data a good thing to have.
If the author wants to explain to us why he thinks OO sucks, that is a legitimate criticism, even if for some of us it would be hard to swallow. However, the fact that the author does not acknowledge the advantages of OO, (even if he believes they are less significant that the disadvantages,) is a good enough reason to ignore his criticism.
Mozilla reveals plans for Firefox 3.2
Feature wise, I don't think there are many things that MySQL can do that PostgreSQL can't given a proper configuration. The main difference is that PostgreSQL doesn't include things like clustering as part of the core distribution like MySQL. They are often released and maintained as third-party add-ons to the core platform.

For instance, PostgreSQL has a number of projects that facilitate clustering. Slony-I is a stable open source replication framework (http://www.slony.info/). PGCluster provides a multi-master replication facility (think Oracle RAC). PGpool allows front end load balancing of connections.
Care to expound a bit?

(I'm not trying to be antagonistic, just interested.)
For being so simple, that's a complicated sentence.
The second property you mention has a good name: polymorphism
Market survey for iphone game
please fill out this market research survey for an upcoming iPhone game. just 5 questions.

http://www.polldaddy.com/s/5CCEDF07130C3F9D/

picture street fighter 2 bonus rounds...
thanks in advance for your participation :)
Because people will pay for 'NEWS' but not for newspapers.
People will pay for upto the minute stock market data rather than the 15min delayed version, they will pay $1000s for market reports, they will pay for WSJ articles on companies they want to buy.

But most newspapers aren't selling news - they are selling entertainment. I don't pay to find out the death toll in some plane crash the day before - I pay for a newspaper to read columnists, editorials, cartoons. That's why sunday papers are the largest and most profitable.

It's like the difference between paying to watch a movie and reading the plot summary fro free on IMDB.
Things like what? My web server works with a phenomenal number of browsers and clients because they all more-or-less follow the HTTP spec. It just works.

And it's more than just frustrating, it makes the idea presented by the OP basically impossible. If you have to add your own processing layer on top of the API, then it loses the magic of having one site ping another.

The web works because browsers and such are tolerant of deviations from the standard. The web works because it has standards, not in spite of them.

You couldn't say "just connect to my server on port 80 and, uh, we'll figure out how to exchange data"
Ignoring the silly, uninformed arguments (i.e. newspaper readers "have never paid for the content"), this piece contains several classic arguments from the Bible of New Economy Bullshit:

1) The Bricks Are the Problem: "In theory, a reader who stops paying for the physical paper but continues to read the content online is doing the publisher a favor."

Mmhm. They said this about store-based retail, too. "Stores can operate more efficiently on the web, and will take over because they don't need the bricks and mortar!" What happened? Well, for starters, we found out that people like to shop in stores. We also found out that logistics, customer service and returns are always significant fixed costs, and the absence of bricks and mortar doesn't necessarily make them cheaper.

2) Race to the Bottom: "every English-language newspaper is in direct competition with every other. Millions of Americans get their news online from The Guardian, which is published in London. This competition, and not some kind of petulance or laziness or addled philosophy, is what keeps readers from shelling out for news."

...and last I checked, the Guardian has the same problems as everyone else in the business. I guess the Utopian ideal here is that every newspaper on the planet gives their content away for free, until they all simultaneously combust in a cloud of bankruptcy lawyers and rainbows.

More seriously: the end-game here is not a world where we have the journalism quality of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, only online and free. The end-game is Gawker and TechCrunch. Sound like a fair trade?

3) Everything Is Different Now, Man: "And the harsh truth is that the typical American newspaper is an anachronism. It is an artifact from a time when chopping down trees was essential to telling the news"

This is not "harsh truth" -- this is 95% wishful thinking, 5% fact. The 5% fact is that there is another way to access media, that has both benefits and drawbacks. The other 95% is that the Silicon Valley, VC-for-everyone corporate culture has infected media, and given it a business model as unsustainable and wasteful as a midnight candy bar delivery from Kozmo.com.

People still like to consume media on paper. It doesn't require electricity, can be done without the aid of a machine, and can be archived easily, by anyone. Granted, the type of content served by traditional media is shifting, but that doesn't mean that newspapers and magazines don't have a future in the Brave New World of digital media.

More importantly, the internet hasn't made it free to produce good content. We all like to dance around this critical fact, pretending that if we just spend enough money on viral loops and news aggregators, we'll be able to reproduce our current media offerings. But we conveniently neglect to notice that many of the interesting articles we read on Digg or news.google are produced by reporters who are being paid by the old media. When it dies, so does the content that powers whizzy web-2.0 social media.
I think this will get blocked in antitrust. Presumably Obama will be more active here than Bush was.
> You're opening yourself up to talent raids, exposure of company dirty laundry,

Nope - there's an agreement covering that. The pissed off founder may win that lawsuit, but can she afford to?

> negative press, and future problems for all your portfolio companies.

Oh really?

Sequoia Capital told its portfolio companies to lay off engineers, to treat them as contractors.

How many entrepreneurs didn't pitch to Sequoia Capital as a result? How many engineers turned down jobs at SC's portfolio companies?
Ummm... Look "mutable" up in a dictionary?
>1. Shut down their physical production lines, immediately saving millions of dollars a year. Move to online only format.
>2. Move full time staff to consultant roles, and retain a small editorial staff of the highest quality.
>3. Focus less on news snippets,

The christian science monitor has done this and successfully gone from being a very local to a world wide brand.
I think you would find that if you drive through the US, you will find the same change from city to town.
I've lived in both cities and towns in the US and Canada, and if you end up making a left turn instead of a right, similar differences exist.
What you might be missing (and what Zakaria's article was pionting out) is that Canadians aren't putting themselves into debt at the same rate as Americans, so while the Americans may 'look' better off, that doesn't mean they are.
Please make it rate limiting that is relaxed as karma increases. Let someone with zero karma submit a story per 2 days or something, not never.