skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi there, here are my thoughts:

Overall very good. I like the URL recognition. Here're my nitpicks:

General:
* If we select the time zone, let us know whether you've taken into account DST.
* I would prefer an e-mail-less signup process as I don't feel there's a need for it. AFAICS password retrieval is the only use and I can't see any evidence you've implemented that. Why do I have to give an email address if I don't even need it to log-in? For the free service, I think you should consider ditching the need for email addresses.
* To-do, unless a branding decision, should not be capitalised unless grammar dictates otherwise. c.f. 'Add this To-do' button.
* Consider moving the 'Add this To-do' button to the side of the to-do entry box.
* Consider changing OS-native buttons to graphic/css buttons which fit in with the style/colouring of your site.

Ease of use:
* Whenever I can see the to-do list, any typing whatever should go into the text box. You can do this with a javascript key bind. Why should I have to deal with clicks and focus when the only point of that page is to jot down items and tick them off?
* Personally, I would advocate a log-in boxes on the front page as well as signup boxes, but I guess that's a design choice.
* Why insist on alphanumeric only usernames particularly as this isn't a restriction for passwords? As a minimalist site, I shouldn't have to worry about what I type in, or be informed about the rules until I break them. The rules should be (as far as possible - and this is where the 'art' of design comes in) the same as I assume. Therefore, unless you have a technical issue, I suggest you allow as many punctuation and non latin characters as possible for both passwords and usernames. Only when I try and use one that's not possible to use due to technical limitations do you apologise and give me the rules.
* It's difficult to delete many items. I don't mind hitting delete myself many times, but the delete button only comes up when you go over the main part of the to-do list meaning there's a lot of mouse movement to delete. If that's a design choice/attempt to stop accidental deletions, fair enough, otherwise it would be good to have it changed.

Bug:
* If you manage to click/select the input box before the page has loaded you can end up with the wrong font and no 'Add this To-do' button. Additionally, pressing return doesn't actually add the to-do although it still brings up the 'Hang tight' box.

As I said, good site!
Tour of Chernobyl
Remotes don't help that much if commercials are synchronized. You might as well just go to the bathroom.

HBO and movie channels break the synchronization.
Scene gossip. Nothing worth reading.
The implicit news feed stories were never really a strong source of virality. Our current data is showing that the new stream is performing quite a bit better for us, but YMMV.
What a nonsense article.

Makes it sound as if the script-playback was the difficult or expensive part of a load-test. In reality that is the trivial part.
Ask HN: Is the Fed the Fox watching over the Fox House?
Obama wants the Fed to regulate banks and hedgefunds...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/us/politics/22regulate.html?hp

But the Fed is the least transparent body with effect over our economy. Is the Fed capable of watching over financial institutions? Isn't that the SEC's job? WTF is going on?
It looks better now.

Another thing is requiring both email and username. You didn't build a social site, I don't need a username/nickname for anything. Usernames are annoying, just another detail to remember. Just use email as ID; if you want to go an extra mile, allow any id suggesting email address as the reasonable choice - look at instapaper.com for inspiration.
What does the graph mean? I see a red rectangle next to a white rectangle. Is the red rectangle downtime? Surely not...
You need some help - there's nothing wrong with that.

The important question is why does the help need you?
That's actually a pretty damn good title, I reckon. It grabs attention and, hey, you're here, aren't you?
If by AI you mean machine learning, yes. If you mean "human-like-interactive-thing," yes but not in a way that means we're substantially closer than we were 15 years ago.

AI in the ML sense is quickly becoming critical to business and is opening up lots of possibilities that we could only dream of 5 years ago. At its heart, Google is basically an ML company for one big example. Facebook is moving in that direction as well. There are lots of startups solving old problems with AI, too, such as Knewton (tutoring), and for some self-promotion, my company (Quantios).
not as much as the amount that comes from fraudulent clicks.
> if commercials are synchronized

Are they? If there are 9 synchronized channels and 1 that's not. I believe that 1 wins, because everyone else switches there out of boredom.
Remindo for the iPhone. Reminders by SMS and email, like magic.
Ask HN: Shopping cart advice?
Hi everyone,
I'm sure this question, or variants of it, has been asked before, so forgive me if this is repetitive.

I'm looking for advice on shopping carts. Googling is hard, because there is so much marketing speak and bad reviews.

I have five main requirements:

1) Non-Hosted. While we will not host the site in house, I want the flexibility of choosing my own hosting provider.

2) Easy to Design for or Skin. We will probably end up paying someone for a professional looking UI, and would like this to be as easy as possible.

3) Good set of included modules. We don't want to roll our own search, shipping, payment gateways, etc.

4) Unix based.

5) Extendable. Ideally the cart would be written in Java/PHP/Ruby/Python, and have a cleanish code base and some documention.

We are willing to spend money, probably up to $2000 USD. If anyone has any suggestions or additional points that should be thought of, I would much appreciate it.

Thanks,
Charlie
Further, what's the y axis?
I think it would be great if I could set my to-do list for the following day (as this is what I usually try to do at night for the coming day).
Would you feel that people were doing you a disservice if their admiration for you prevented them from honestly evaluating your arguments?
Or ctrl + R
What doesn't Sun get? this is a hacker's hack; an Smalltalk implementation in javascript:

http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/index.xhtml

Read what the man wrote:

"Everything you need is in the browser. There is a dynamic language there. It may not be your favorite, but it's not a bad one either. There is also a graphics system. Not the best, but pretty nice. Hook it all up with a simple user interface and you're having fun the way people should have fun with computing. I don't mean just fun for entertainment, but it's creatively inspiring. It makes you want to do cool stuff,"

Ingalls, for the uninitiated, pioneered the implementation of high-performance Smalltalk systems, including his contribution to Squeak. Wikipedia credits him for inventing the BitBlt algorithm that made bitmapped displays FAST, and invented popup menus.

If anybody is qualified to say what is a fun, intuitive programming environment it's Dan Ingalls.
Since it's running on CEST (Central European Standard Time), and just for today, yes, the red bar is downtime.
I'm not questioning that it's an inconvenience or that there will be false positives.

I'm pointing out that "mild" is inaccurate.

In ducking my question of how many of these "mild inconveniences" you're willing to pay for, you concede that point.

Let me suggest that the more costly the inconvenience, the lower the acceptable false positive rate. And, if the inconvenience is serious enough, the folks inconvenienced should be compensated. (And, no, you don't get to bargain away the compensation by letting them off of something else that you wouldn't have found without the false positive.)

One benefit from compensating folks who are "inconvenienced" is that forces the relevant parties to do a better job in minimizing the total cost (which is proportional to the false positive rate multiplied by the cost of the inconvenience).

It's amazing how people's priorities depend on who's paying.
So are you saying that 90% of the people who want privacy want it for illegal reasons? Then you won't mind if I read all your email?

That's what I thought.
For Your Sunday Bullshit Reading: Search Ads Are “Misdirection” Advertising
Yes. How meta of us. :)

How many times in history has a change in the state of a community's forum turned into a dominating discussion onto itself?
You can actually "hack" pat.io to do this. Add the items you want on tomorrow's list, and then hover over each one and click "Shift" - the item will disappear until tomorrow.
Well, any change invites considerable resistance. So I'd even say they have to ignore more than 1%.

Most of us tech savvy people don't realize this, but a lot of people (if not most) use software through memorization. They memorize their path to the most common tasks that they use it for, and stick to those. Call it the 80-20 of use cases. A really good UI allows people to learn these new tasks relatively easily, but that is not to say this is not cumbersome for most people regardless. Any change requires users to pause and invest time in discovery before they can actually do what they want to do.

So, any change is annoying in itself for these users; and that is completely regardless of the merits of the change. User adoption after users are (not to sound too fascist) forced to accept changes is the real measure of the legitimacy of these changes, not the initial reaction.

As software engineers and designers we have to have a much longer term understanding of feature growth and functionality, if it was up to users it would always be more of the same which gets too complicated way too quickly. You add one more button of that much desired functionality and pretty soon you're left with remote controllers with a hundred buttons.
Kindle makes me more excited for the next generation of ebook readers than it does for itself. When I use it, I think how amazing the next-gen readers are going to be. And the great part is that all the tech it needs to Get It Right exists in an affordable fashion.

I think my primary issue is with the slowness of the device and the clunkiness of the "5-way". Once they get this part right, perhaps replacing 5-way with a touch screen, they'd be great. I don't need color, though that will come with time, but I don't like feeling frustrated trying to use the device quickly to look up information or move from mode to mode.
I'm currently going around visiting potential Ph.D. programs as an admit for next year, and at all the top schools (CMU, Stanford, Berkeley) the amount of people studying AI and machine learning is staggering. The field is definitely academically very active.
Shameless plug for my University: http://z.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab/publications_recent.php
Well right now you are using an application -- Hacker News -- that is written in pg's Arc language which runs as an interpreter on MzScheme which is part of PLT Scheme.

Why don't more people use DrScheme, HTDP, etc.? This is a question about learning, culture, change, etc. more than any particular environment, method, etc.
I thought this comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/3... had an interesting analysis of why some people are accused of being cult leaders and not others.
Thanks very much. I'll digest all of these and see what I can come up with.

On the email issue, I may just ditch usernames, as I need email for password recovery (didn't get to build that yet), plus one or two email based features.

Thanks so much for taking the time to really analyze the site and provide this great feedback.
Yeah, after this and a few other people mentioning it, I'm considering ditching usernames.
I'm looking forward to trying the Kindle, but it's not available (afaik) in Canada.
XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Prevention Cheat Sheet
It was indeed down in the early morning.
Don't go into THAT field unless you have guts of STEEL.
Atari 2600 Programming Tutorial
I just saw a video of Zuckerberg on Google Video (NYC Facebook developers meeting in Dec 2007).

He predicted accurately where they'd be by now in terms of numbers.

But I got this impression: He listens to his (outside) developers.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8966315003179793637...
Either that or believe in the singularity.
Plagiarists Are Just Confused About Whether Copying Without Attribution Is Okay
While an interesting tool, it was running very slow for me. I don't see why this needed to be a flash application.
Have you considered the cost of that to scale? (no idea of the application ofc).

DB writes are very expensive. There is no reason why you cant bootleg a caching system to handle the on-refresh updates with things like sessions. One of the problems I always have with recent articles about caching web content is that people seem obsessed with not having ot change the cache at all! That's not the point - the point of the cache is to have regularly used, on demand data easily accessible. A session node is prime material for that. Yes it needs to be updated quite frequently but there is absolutely no need to save it anywhere permanently whilst it is in use! (of course once you get to super-scale apps like Facebook it does then become a problem to maintain all the cached data across multiple locations :) but if you can hold everything on a couple of servers it's not going ot present an issue).

@the OP: caching standard elements of a page is always a good idea. Caching "dynamic blocks" will also be a good approach (it is one I use) on the basis that if only one needs updating you dont have to refresh the whole cache just on portion :)

Just dont og overboard - i.e. if you start to get 20 or so block (though I cant imagine anyone would :S) the overhead of pulling the cache might start to have an effect.
Actually, I don't mind my name being a URL at all. My first name's Chirag and my site is http://chir.ag and I wouldn't mind getting facebook.com/chirag either. Where's the option on Facebook where I can set that up?
Bad article. The seed of a cryptographic generator isn't unknown to the programmer. That's not what makes cryptographic generators different. What makes them different is that it's computationally infeasible to derive the seed from the output, or even distinguish the output from random, e.g. tell whether a certain sequence came from this generator.
The singularity is probably inevitable. I doubt it we'll see it in our lifetimes, though.
Actually I'm not sure this had anything to do with the new design. It may have been coincidence that the bug was found now (I'll try to find out).
The promise that you, too can make a web page, and it's as easy as surfing the web(!) smells really 1997. Especially considering that the content is all about programming languages and the like, I doubt anyone in the target market is intimidated by making a web page.

Also, just looking at it, what's it for? Making web pages about technology? There are lots of web pages about technology, and lots of places to host new ones.
Sorry, guys, but this really isn't the place for this sort of thing.
Unless you're a proven company, it's nearly impossible to get people to sign onto a secret project you can't tell them about. Apple was able to do it with the iPhone, and DEKA had similar success with Segway/Ginger. But you're neither Jobs or Kamen, so it's going to be a lot harder, especially with a sloppy webpage.
For me, it's like trying to persuade me to use ReiserFS, rather than ext3. I just don't care unless it's performing badly.

Why can't you just "svn update Foo" ? Then you don't have to deal with the changes to Bar :/ I don't really see what the issue is. Are you often working on exactly the same files as other developers, and not co-ordinating what you're doing?

>> "Anyway, I am glad you like svn. But it is probably due to some reason other than svn's technical merits..."

I like it, because it solves my use case perfectly. I'm not quite sure you understand that.

I'm not one of these people that love technical solutions for the sake of being technical.
That's not how I read it, I think this actually makes a lot of sense.

In a regular (non-cloud) deployment, there are unavoidable differences between the staging and real production configurations. No one can afford to double their hardware costs for the sake of uber-realistic load testing results. So people usually opt to create a closely matched staging environment where testing is performed. Every once in a while something slips by that's only reproducible on production, and you're stuck debugging a critical and hard to reproduce bug. Not the best combination.

With cloud computing, you're supposed to have lots of redundant computing capacity. So it's trivial to test in an environment that's identical to production by just asking for more processing power for the purposes of testing. As an added bonus you also have the distributed resources to generate considerable parallel load, which also helps.

That last part like you said is not that hard. But that's only the icing. The cake is being able to test on a 1-1 replica of production. That's precious.
ZenCart.
No money is necessary, check out Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/). It's very flexible, fully open source, and has a very active community.
Or cmd + R
Hey there,

Nice looking application :)

One small suggestion - "Powered" is misspelled in your title ("Powerd [sic] by Basecamp"). I hate to be pedantic but it kinda jumped out at me - being a title, and all.
I'm curious. The tour guide guy—since he's regularly giving tours of these areas, would he be exposed to enough radiation for it to have an effect on him?
Saw it on Reddit a few days ago. Someone there pointed me to this excellent documentary, The True Battle of Chernobyl http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5384001427276447319

Watching it now. At about the 36-minute mark a bunch of technicians dig a tunnel into the base of the reactor 15 days after the incident. The footage is terrifying.
Paper Airplane and The Two Way Web
FYI- when I clicked on the link I received nothing but a blank screen.
I think you missed the point of why he brought that up. He's not disappointed. But he's able to distance himself from his own experiences and view them from the perspective of Facebook and Twitter.
I just asked Trevor what was going on. Apparently we turned off the restart-HN process back when we were hacked a few days ago, and we forgot to turn it back on. Things should be back to normal now.
I just pushed some changes and restarted the server. I bet I got you with that.

Try again! :)
The photos are interesting, but the commentary (either author's or his guide's) is rather lacking and sometimes downright clueless.
The Javascript Trap
Seems like all these arguments are stemming from the (newly resurfaced) debate about "online personal brand", and creating an identity as such. I'm all for diluting these namespaces with GUIDs or similar--who's to say I'm the most important Joe Smith in the world?
His point about the expressiveness of today's systems is a very good one, and there are other interesting examples to back it up.

BeOS/Haiku could fit an entire OS with full-featured desktop environment into well under 150 Megabytes. There are also various small linux distros. The Symbolics Lisp Machines are another example of this. I don't know how large the installed OS was, but a friend who used to work for Symbolics told me that on many occasions, customers of Symbolics would have their jaws drop when they were told that the entire developer team had only 8 or so programmers.

The fact that it takes upwards of 4 gigabytes to store the code for a "modern" OS and applications indicates there is a lot of room for improvement.

("Modern" really means kernel from the 70's plus window management and GUIs from the 80's.)
Thanks,
Magento looks good. I will definitely keep looking at this.
A few days ago when that guy hacked the site, we turned off the process that restarts News when it gets wedged, and we forgot to turn it back on.
I'm saying even if you do buy any of the three common definitions of "Singularity" (http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools) then you still don't go into AGI unless you're willing to embark on the equivalent of a 30-year startup.

How many successful Internet entrepreneurs do you know? Okay, now how many successful AGI projects do you know? That tells you something about the relative difficulty here.

Basic research in the midst of scientific chaos is HARD.
I'd say no. My dad worked in AI 20-30 years ago(worked on some AI project for Russian military, something to do with nukes), and he looks for jobs in the field, now and then. And from what he say about, it seems like the AI field is pretty much frozen right now.

There are almost no jobs available, and the few available are usually the be assistant to some professor who is trying to do something that was already done 20 years ago.
It's easy -- assemble the 'blocks' on the client-side.
The personal organizer software problem is a tricky one. It is unique in that even the slightest inconvenience or diversion in the workflow can render the application unusable, because the very purpose of the app is to offload that sort of trivia from your mind.

Because everyone has different habits and thought patterns, there is no one workflow that suits everyone and the cognitive overhead introduced by a flexible workflow, while tolerable in other kinds of applications, is show stopping in a PIM app. Workflow for a particular person may also vary between contexts e.g. work, home, hobbies, socializing, etc.

As such, I fully encourage the proliferation of todo apps with slight variations in design. However, I believe that we will ultimately need something highly adaptable that can be "programmed" to the detailed specifications of each user. What sort of "programming" would be both remedial enough for the layperson and flexible enough to cover the entire domain remains a mystery.

FYI, I use this:
http://todoist.com
You did pretty well at avoiding squirm-induction, I think - I'm glad you tried to put yourself in my/his shoes.

For the record, one of the best ways to avoid inducing squirms and induce a strong warm fuzzy feeling is to talk about what the one has inspired you to do - i.e., "PG, it's as a result of reading your work that I learned Lisp as my first programming language and started hacking on open source", even if you never founded your own startup, is probably going to induce a stronger warm fuzzy feeling than any amount of praise directed at particular essays you liked.
Ask HN: What Visa for a UK team to come to YC?
We're a UK team applying for YC. I'm wondering what visa we would need to work in the US for 3 months and how difficult is it to get?

If we were accepted for YC we would only have just over a month to get the visa.

Have any UK teams here been to YC, Techstars etc.?
I guess you'd want to monitor the levels and periods of exposure pretty closely. There are still people working at Chernobyl (containment, monitoring)... In fact, the plant kept operating for over a decade after the incident.

Not sure this is standard practice -- but there are also drugs you can take to lessen the impact.
Exactly. Additionally, the AI label is changing its meaning over the time.

My AI professors used to tell semi-jokingly that whenever we get computers to solve some task we thought required intelligence (thus we produced AI), the "intelligence" part of the AI gets redefined to exclude this particular solved topic (e.g. chess). We humans need to feel we are special.

Keeping this in mind, AI in the narrow sense is stagnating, AI in the broad sense is growing.

You could see "AI field" as a kind of incubator: cool stuff that works gets splintered into own subfields (computer vision, robotics, machine learning, neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary algorithms etc).

----

Also, Wikipedia seems to have quite nice overview of the history of AI:

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