skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I let my girlfriend do it. The last time I bought a car, I decided what I wanted and shopped around the local dealers and got a good offer at $18,000. I told my girlfriend about the deal, and she said, "Way too expensive."

She gets on the web and looks at all the dealer in Northern CA, and finds one of those lo-ball one-only offers in San Francisco. She calls the dealer and gets him to hold the car for her, since we would have to drive 240 miles to get there. Then she starts calling local dealers to find one that would match the offer. The nearest one wouldnt, but one an hour away would. She got me the car for $14,000.

A few years earlier we bought a house and needed a new refrigerator and dishwasher. We go to Sears and find what we want. She then proceeds to negotiate several hundred dollars of the sticker price. I didnt even know you could bargain with Sears.

The downside is that I cant make a simple purchase any longer. She makes me go for the best deal.
The truth of the matter is that the "switching easily" mentality makes us a very easy market to break into. I say this as someone who always looks for open source first (not because it's cheaper), but is more than willing to pay (or get work to pay for) tools that are really worth something. It's like the cost/benefit analysis of good furniture and good hardware: it just doesn't make any sense to skimp on anything that will give a significant boost in productivity, as long as it's not outrageously expensive and you don't waste time learning it. Hence, the easy switchers.
This video exhibits such a poor understanding of math, physics, chemistry, and biology that it should not be promoted or even taken as anything but pure drivel.

Ignorance masquerading as expertness is not acceptable. All this is is an attempt to scam people.
I've come across words in the OSPD that Words with Friends didn't take, as well as words not in the OSPD that it did take. A casual Google suggests that Words with Friends uses a modified version of a dictionary called ENABLE[1], so while it would be interesting data to see, the dictionary difference is a little troublesome for conclusions pertaining to Scrabble.

(You can, of course, play Scrabble with any dictionary but most serious folk I know use OSPD. I'd never even heard of ENABLE until Googling this question.)

[1]: http://blogmybrain.com/words-with-friends-cheat/words.txt
True - in competitive scrabble luck actually plays a pretty small role. It's much closer to chess than it is to poker.
Ok, but the site's first suggestion is to use Leiningen to install the koans. It links to a generic Leiningen installation page, but then doesn't tell you how to use it to install the koans.

Unless they expect the new user to spend significant time learning about that tool before moving on to their koans, I think it'd really be much better to have a short how-to for that.
Now now, are you saying coverage on Tech Crunch can be bought? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!
It will be interesting to see whether variable symlinks can bring some Plan9ish filesystem elegance to *nix.
>Just because it's not a problem for 95% of people doesn't mean it's not a problem.

It's not a problem for 99+% of people. That means it's not a problem for 99+% of people. It's like any rare but unfortunate event that people rationally choose not to insure against. And it sucks to be you if you're the statistical outlier, but you already know what to do if you're worried about that: Choose a different service that has a worse overall user experience because they spent their money on giving you someone to talk to on the phone instead of on producing a well-engineered service.
Any thoughts as to why they didn't sell the titles rather than shuttering them? I'm thinking maybe they share code across games and don't want it in outside hands, or maybe they weren't revenue positive, or perhaps don't want to hand over any portion of their user database to a competitor. Any other ones I am missing?
It really is better to either have them make a first offer (or at least, give you a range) or to be slightly over-the-top when making your own first offer.

Aside from that, there are at least 3 important dimensions:

- location
- experience
- field

The important thing is that you are being paid what you think you are worth. If you are self-aware and experienced, that should come more from your own views than based on what other people are making (don't count your neighbour's money).

If you aren't sure, you need to talk to people..including friends and colleagues. I mean, honestly, you say you have a hard time finding some information out, but don't feel comfortable talking to the most important people about it. Get over it and talk to them.
How exactly would programming for themselves in a vacuum build any sort of positive confidence?

Open source builds up that portfolio everyone wants to see, and working on a project provides mentors to help give new developers guidance.
Is there a good reason not to believe that mobile will eventually swing to HTML, for the same reasons that desktop apps yielded to web apps?
I've had people shout at me about making up rules after capturing en passant.
Yep, reproducible. Quick add parses them correctly though. Eg, "meeting on 1/1/13" gives you an entry on 1 Jan 2013.
No; Kingdom of Loathing is run by Asymmetric Publications (http://asymmetric.net/), which is only a few people: http://asymmetric.net/people.html .

And if Zynga didn't steal game mechanics or the business model from KoL, what did they take? While KoL was an early browser-based game, it certainly wasn't the first (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplayer_browser_ga...).
Nothing quite like being called ignorant by a stupid person.
Top Tech Companies Of 2012
Fedora 17 running Cinnamon as my desktop environment. My time is spent between Rhythmbox, Chrome, urxvt {tmux {weechat}}, and pidgin.
SVG is definitely right for icon fonts in Chrome, but it makes text fonts look blurry (rather than jagged). It's perhaps more aesthetically pleasing, but it's definitely harder to read.

This effect is present in this blog post. See http://cl.ly/image/0E1g1Z3F3t31 for example. It's less pronounced with larger font faces, but the aliasing makes the text feel fuzzy rather than crisp. At smaller font weights, it's downright blurry and very unpleasant to read.
>But Zynga’s share price got decimated over the past year.

Well no, not really. I mean, yes, I guess it technically did. Then it got decimated again. And then it got decimated 12 more times.
In what other language you have direct access to methods as first class objects to do an immediate execution of a method returned by an execution container (parenthesis in JS) ?

I think most people would write it like this:

playing ? player.play() : player.pause()
> On this issue, Biden was clearly on the wrong side of history (and some of the fundamental tenets upon which the US was founded).

Probably on the wrong side of history, but it's pure historical revisionism to say it opposed any principle the U.S. was founded upon. Common law courts in England had broad subpoena powers (just like modern U.S. courts). Moreover, investigators had unlimited access to private documents pursuant to a validly executed warrant. The founders never contemplated a "document the government could never get at." What they contemplated was a series of protections against the government's ability to get documents.
We use properties file (whose encoding is defined) to contain our UTF-8 characters.

Yup...but it's defined as ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8 ( http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Propertie... ). You need to escape everything else. Also the escapes are only for BMP characters, so supplementary characters need multiple unicode escapes to represent a single 'character'.

There's too many rough edges in interoperability. You do still need to know this stuff if you work outside of Latin-1.
That's why I note that improvement would involve manufacturing in metal. This may be possible already to a limited degree, for example, with sintered metal, but that's an expensive process that isn't economical for washing machine parts.
This year I got married and started freelancing. Now I'm building a company around my consulting services and launching my first product.

It's been a great year and I think 2013 will be even better.
Indie Game Fez is Eurogamer's Game of the Year
eurogamer.net seems to be tripping HN's spam filter, so here's the link: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-12-30-eurogamers-game-of-the-year-2012
I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with "decimate." Glad to see there's somebody else on HN still fighting the good fight though.
Your girlfriend is a boss.

Does her she work in a field where you especially need negotiation skills?
The Delta app is actually very useful - I don't categorize it as "apptrash" at all. It tells me the gate, reminds me when I'm able to check in, and even has a spot for me to record where I parked my car. :)

My only beef is that not all of their gates have scanners capable of reading the boarding pass barcode off the phone, so I end up printing the passes anyway.
Why the Best Doesn't Always Win
The perfect scam is the self-fulfilling prophecy [1]: Write a book titled "How to make millions writing ebooks." Suppose it goes on to make millions. Done.

Now suppose a guy named Jack flew to the moon. He writes a book "How I flew to the moon." It makes millions. He blogs about "How I made millions selling a book about how I flew to the moon."

See the difference?

[1] Especially pernicious in stock market pump-and-dumps.
The "huge lie" was about the vehicle? It's not entirely clear why you went to the second dealer after getting the terms you wanted out of the first.
Mobile OS developers, don’t be lazy, give me a half decent language that doesn't make my eyes bleed.
To be clear this problem is with Chrome on Windows only, as Chrome isn't yet using DirectWrite ( https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=124406#c... )

This solution is only useful for Windows and will likely regress the visual fidelity of the font in both Mac and Linux.
Worth noting here that "invoice" is a meaningless number too. "The dealers are provided with incentives by the manufacturers", which is another way of saying that the invoice prices are a fairy tale. Invoice is the new sticker.

There's a pretty good EconTalk with Russ Roberts talking about the fine details with a dealership sales manager. You have to read between the lines (Roberts is not such a great interviewer that he gets a car salesman to torpedo their own best interests) but it's pretty illuminating.

As in all things, it's mostly about the market. There are makes/models where sticker isn't even the real sticker; for instance, cars with waitlists are unlikely to get purchases under sticker. On the other hand, you can capture much of the dealer's incentive if you choose the right time of month to make an offer on a car the dealer would like to get off their lot.
Absolutely, affirming the consequent, because he obviously would have built Apple without his life experiences leading up to that point, we can apply specific fallacy to his entire fallacy from a single specific example and feel smarter about our selves for never making such a silly mistake! Besides, we're all way to busy doing "real work" to do something as silly and wasteful as play.

Why do anything if it isn't for the profit of other people? Isn't it an accepted fact that our entire self worth is judged on how much value we provide to others? This goes hand and hand with the obviously true preposition that each person should be only self interested and through complicated interactions of the perfect market, we'll ultimately be helping other people! Because we're all identical and have the same drives, as it is written. The irony of this statement only proves that it's true. hallelujah!
If you have lein, you can run `lein repl` which provides awesome tab-completions, documentation, and source for any given function. Pretty handy for beginners I'd say!
Actually, McMaster doesn't manufacture anything, as far as I know. They are a distributor. (They tend to deliberately obscure this by refusing to tell you the brand name or actual manufacturer of any item they sell in advance.)

But back to the main point. The "long tail" type of business I envision is one that manufactures one-offs, or quantities so limited that the volume demand is below the level needed to interest a distributor such as McMaster.
"That sandbox" is exactly what stops code from an ipa from escaping. Apple does not do a particularly deep analysis on the code in an app before approving it. They do a superficial check for use of private/deprecated APIs, which is pretty easy to bypass, and that's it.

It is possible to find holes in the sandbox, see for example the jailbreak.me exploit from iOS 4. But it's hard, and Apple will patch any holes that they find out about.

This is a point that people badly misunderstand, sadly. The sandbox is what keeps you, as a user, safe from malicious code. Apple's checks don't really help at all, aside from their ability to pull malicious apps after the fact. Apple's checks are there to ensure a basic level of functionality and avoid content Apple doesn't want to publish. They do essentially nothing for the security of the platform, and are not intended to.
Vishal Gurbuxani gave us the marketing perspective on this last month in Napa: http://www.slideshare.net/vgurbuxani/app-retreat-2012

One major problem: HTML5 is fragmented across platforms and is missing important ingredients needed by app businesses. In the end, it's just another platform, and not a very good one if a good user experience is something that you hope to deliver.

Read Vishal's slides for more, or come ask him about them at his session at Renaissance: http://renaissance.io/speakers/vishal_gurbuxani
These people are really interesting. Going to read more about them, thanks!
Democracy is hard
Remember what happened with Google Buzz? It's pretty much a mirror of a user's Twitter/Facebook stream.

My Google+ network doesn't have much activity relative to Twitter/FB but I still visit it once a day because the content is mostly unique, not the same ones I see on my Facebook and Twitter streams.
It's almost as real life isn't actually bound by logic and math as defined by contemporary humans.
I don't know if this is just their test runner or whether it is a problem in Clojure proper, but it's really frustrating to see "Assertion failed" with zero description of the runtime error. I have to fire up a REPL and reverse engineer the expected value, instead of just observing what the expression evaluates to as in the ruby koans.

As an example:

"But watch out if you try to pop nothing"
(= __ (try
(pop '())
(catch IllegalStateException e "No dice!")))

That code causes an error that looks like this:

Problem in /home/clueless/clojure-koans/src/koans/02_lists.clj
---------------------
Assertion failed!
But watch out if you try to pop nothing
(= __ (try (pop (quote ())) (catch IllegalStateException e "No dice!")))

That's just a transliteration of the Clojure expression from my source code. It's not even as good as a line number, because it's not greppable. If I were actually to encounter this in a failing test, you had better believe I would want to know what the right-hand-side actually evaluated to in context, not just what the compiled expression looks like.
in due time, not really. However, as mobile is a very much evolving platform, for the next few years native code will have earlier access to new features before html through additional api's has.
Will it snow today?
I totally understand where you're coming from. My wife does all the negotiating for us. She negotiated the price for the diamond for her engagement ring. She almost walked away from the perfect one because the seller refused to go down another $200, even though she had already bargained down to a great price. I told her "honey, let me handle it, I'll get down another $200." I just gave the seller what she was asking for...
Sure. I think the information you have applies only to options on publicly-traded stock because the value of stock that is not publicly traded is sufficiently hard to determine to prevent it from becoming a routine or traditional part of an employee's compensation package. One way to value a non-traded stock is to use the valuation used in investments, but there are not enough investment events for the phrase "the value of the stock the day you start" to make sense -- especially when you take into account that the terms of many investments are never published (with the result that the employee would need to take the startup's word on the terms).

That's how I conclude that the information you give in great grandparent does not apply in the current situation :)
I tend to agree. Even a properly optimized, Simonized and Vulcanized app needs to be run through a browser layer, which inherently slows things down. Javascript bridges to native functionality are messy and can fail. And for what? Writing one code base? How much client-side logic are you really doing that you don't want to replicate?

Any mobile app I write that requires server logic is basically just a view, so it needs to accept and manipulate JSON. Interface Builder gets you an interface in minutes (of course, you can spend time tweaking it), and there are dozens of networking libraries that consume a service and spit out native objects (if that's your thing). At the risk of speaking in absolutes, you will never get a better experience than a native, first-class one. Ask Facebook - it didn't work out so well for them.
The Wikipedia article is good at explaining the rationale. According to it, it was added around the time the two-space opening move for a pawn was added to balance the game.

Oddly, though Wikipedia deletes programming languages like Factor due to non-notability[1], editors get to go nuts on everything chess or Star Trek without recourse. If you want to know more about why things in chess are the way they are, Wikipedia is your pal.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Factor_(programming_langua...
Cycling is one of my fondest memories from childhood. One of the biggest drawbacks to living in the city I live in is that it isn't very cyclist-friendly, so I don't really view biking to work as an option. I live about 6 miles from my office but any reasonable route to/from work would require riding on congested roads with drivers who don't know how to interact with cyclists. The possibility of serious injury or death resulting from someone hitting me with their vehicle at 35mph just isn't worth it. :(
another? what other books have you written?
Humans control robot arms with only their thoughts [video]
Xbox and amazon both offer show subscriptions, why is it hard to believe that Intel can't get the same deal?

Channel by Channel is the only "new" thing, and while it might be hard to believe Scripps would unbundle all their channels, it would not be hard to believe that BBC, and Nick, and Disney would be VERY happy to have their channels not muddied with the offerings of "lesser" channels
Looks like it depends on KDE4, but they distributed the binaries under windows? Anyone know if they plan a DEB or RPM release?
3D printing is disruptive, not to industrial manufacturing, but to the retail value-chain. As mail-order is currently disrupting retail, 3D printing will disrupt both retail and mail-order.

"Ink" will be sold as a commodity at supermarkets/gas stations (perhaps eventually piped directly as a utility, like gas or water - though our consumption would need to increase dramatically to justify that).

Profits will be made on product design, and the industry will look just like the downloadable information-based industries of today: software/games/music/movies/education/news. Some business models will be a service related to the product, not the product itself. Although long-tail diversification will be possible, it mostly will be be dominated by a few products and corporations (due to the same factors as today: concentration of resources, quality assurance of trademarks, wish for community support (e.g. SO questions), marketing reach and herd mentality). Although initially suppliers will be diverse, the industry will soon consolidate - the same pattern as every other new technology.

Components that can't be 3D printed - e.g. silicon - will become addable modules (a cheap commodity, bought like screws/nails/pet-food pellets that you add to the hopper). Designs will modularize around this interface.

There'll be open source versions too - also consolidated, for the above reasons, as they are today.
This is some kind of a sad example you put here on HN...

This is basically the worst part of Clojure (and only on the JVM at that): catching a Java exception.

I know that's not your point but --and I'm a huge Clojure fan-- seeing a Java idiosynchrasy like that one makes me want to give up Clojure : (
No; but surely you're not unkindly construing I wrote too many lines? I assert that in C it would have been many times the size, and probably never worked at all.

I've reduced 10,000 lines of C code to a 12-line template. Surely that is a good thing? This is not typical but a good example of high-leverage tools.
yep, Objective-C sucks. But Javascript, is that such a straightforward language? You might think that because you are familiair with it, but I remember learning it after Java and that was not a good experience.
I took up cycling from similarly un-athletic beginnings out of necessity because I had no other transportation. That necessity was lucky for me, because I never would have had the discipline to follow through on it if I had the option not to. I'm great at thinking of excuses. It's too hot/cold. It's raining. I'm tired. I'm late. But after a few months, something changed, and I started looking forward to my rides, and found that they were getting easier. After that it didn't take much before I was totally hooked. That was 8 years ago, and the benefits to my health, energy, and general outlook on life have been large. Group rides can also be a great way to meet people over a common experience.

Anyway, bikes are great.
I'd love to hear some opinions from anyone with speech recognition experience on how this stacks up to the commercial alternatives.
What are you trying to say? The word was used quite correctly.
Have you tried sponsoring podcasts? I'm really intrigued by that model, but don't (yet) have the funds to advertise on a TWiSt or 5by5.
Indeed --- Python goes to great lengths to work this way, automatically binding the self argument on method extraction.

o.f()

Can be decomposed in Python:

func = o.f
func()

JavaScript fails this test, and it's a shame.
I am so happy to have found this. People often ask me about how to properly handle Unicode in python at my $dayjob. I now have an "official"-sounding name for the "decode early, unicode everywhere, encode late" mantra I always tried to explain: "Unicode sandwich". I like it, and it is solid advice.
I've found happiness through Ultrarunning. I can relate to many of things that the author mentions but one thing is particularly poignant:

> I distinctly remember the first time I actually made it up that hill, I remember feeling that if I could do something that I sucked at so bad couple weeks ago now, I could do apply that to anything.

Once I found I could run for 3 hours non stop it felt amazing, then 4 hours, 5 and so on. It was the first time in life that I really got the feeling that hard work could bring massive benefits to areas that I had no previous experience in. And no one had to show me. I could just go out and do it.

Anything really is possible.
Cable companies like bundles more than Content providers do. And Producers would like to cut much of the "pipeline" out of the picture.

Shows like Firefly would have done much better in a world where consumers paid directly for the content, than a world where the networks determined air dates, and messed with schedules.
Templates for Product Shots in Real Environments