skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the conclusion that "intellectuals" will feel most smug about, but the truthful version doesn't speak well of them.

"Intellectuals" have a nasty habit of believing that their conclusions are more grounded in science than they actually are. (For example, the existence of AGW doesn't actually lead to any policy, let alone a specific one.) Moreover, their "it's science" belief gives them unwarranted confidence which they turn to rage when they're questioned by their "inferiors".

Intellectuals also think that their expertise means things that it doesn't. For example, they're sympathetic to the idea that the best chess player should be president of the chess club.
I didn't see the section where the author described the evidence that he would accept as proving his position wrong.
Engineer by training, entrepreneur by affliction.
Where Hackers (couldn't) Go
Is Declaring Bankruptcy On Student Loans Even Possible?
how is that not included in normal homeless options? you're talking about taxpayer funded programs. I'm talking about a business.
and you think homeless people have a low time-preference?
a homeless person by definition doesn't have long term interests. The whole point is to give them a short term solution so that the IMMEDIACY of not freezing to death doesn't prevent them from making longer term plans.
"Whining" is a label for "critical thinking" that the labeler doesn't approve of.
The line is where you and others draw it by upvoting or flagging.
Sure, but it really sucks for a whole lot more people who are not just starting out and have lost their retirement. I would be more sensitive about that.
Ask PG: How often are the ratings for HN submissions crunched
I was just curious how it's implemented.

I know the formula is:

(p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5

where p and t are:

p = votes (points) from users.
t = time since submission in hours.

So to reduce the load on the server, is
the calculation done every X number of
minutes? Then when you query for the
stories, do you just sort by rating desc?
No longer true. Indiana is mostly observing DST as of a couple of years ago.
I'm an editor at Mobile Orchard. I didn't post this here or encourage anyone else to post it. It is not spam (come on, the #53 ranked user submitted it!). Get your facts straight before slandering others in future.

Mobile Orchard's value is that it provides iPhone developers with summaries of the latest news relevant to them as well as editorial content. This post is a summary. It still has value to our audience (2000+ iPhone developers).

And, clearly our headline was of value.. except it's now being used without credit to link directly to the poorly titled original. Ethics? What were they again?
Just when I thought I had settled on hg, something new comes along that gives me second thoughts.
I'm waiting for Ubiquity to become a standard part of the FF release. I use it constantly.
This is exactly what I was looking for :D

Thanks
It's done per story when one's score changes
after a vote, and also occasionally for random
stories near the top. See the source.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to just say you're an investor?
Cisco frowns upon purchasing second hand equipment from "unlicensed" vendors. They claim that their software is non-transferable meaning that you technically don't own any of the IOS that comes with used routers. So if you need an upgrade or security update you are basically screwed until you fork over a ton of money.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/hw_sw_relicensing_program.ht...
Any word on whether these will be 32 bit or 64 instances. Slicehost's ram is far less "efficient" than linode, and you only really need 64bit for addressing ram anyway.
Wow, this is really great news. I use Amazon EC2 for all my web hosting and absolutely love it. Total control of a not-too-shabby box for 70$ a month was a great deal. For 40$ a month it's a downright steal.

Thanks for sharing.
thanks, i didn't write it. I remembered that in some magazine from 1999. The link to the author is in the comment below
As a network neophyte, what are the "cards" they are talking about in the article?
That was a typo. I definitely meant to say linode.
No, I just meant that grown women are a demographic which does not actively resist paying money for software. I sell to them, and sometimes feel like I'm the only one in the world doing so.

You know how many complaints about price I've heard in the last 3 years? One, and she was really complaining about the bug that was preventing her from getting her $30's worth.

BigFish and the other casual companies have conclusively demonstrated, by the way, that women will pay $20 for a good match 3 game.
That wasn't the point. The point is that if you have minimal money, some freedom, and plenty of free space, you can just about function (as the tent cities, favelas, and so forth demonstrate). Those are dire places to live but at least you have mobility when the jobs come back.. whereas if you're stuck in social housing you are screwed.

The US is full of mobile, resourceful people who have a freedom over the land Europeans could only dream of. They'll get through this however bad it gets. Lazy, dole-riding Europeans? I'm not so sure.

(note: I'm not saying "all Europeans are X" but using an adjective to describe a group of Europeans.. sadly some people are stupid enough to think <adjective> <noun> means all <noun> are <adjective>)
This seems to me a rather unjustified response, especially with the financial constructs that have enabled the current crisis in mind, which are a very American invention indeed.
By the way, thanks to whichever moderator thought it was cool to steal our headline but change the link. Finally, a headline of mine that wasn't changed because it sucked, just the URL ;)
With the recent launch of Google Voice, google might end up having the best social network data of any social network, since they will essentially act as the phone company, your email provider(Gmail), and your instant messaging service(Gtalk). (i.e. they could know who all your friends were and how often you spoke to each of them) [this is assuming you aren't doing all your messaging through facebook]
You, sir, draw a very strange question mark.
The article is off by a factor of at least 2, given that $50,000/year -> 25$/hr, not $50/hr.

Moreover, everyone wastes time every day at the job, except sometimes, when they have deadlines. If a worker misses 16 minutes some Monday, they'll probably make it up over the course of the week.

Big deal.
I almost have to stop myself puking from doing this (sorry!) but.. it does not "beg the question": http://begthequestion.info/

Hey, I'm just a messenger :)
Same here. 'Computer stuff' is simple and to the point, sometimes they'll ask for more details but usually not.

It's so hard for me to put a single label on myself because I do so many different things. I'm a freelance writer, SEO, programmer, marketer, PR-person and much, much more.
I'd rather be talking about bubbles than recessions.

Seriously, though, the amount of ad dollars businesses spend yearly makes $250k to advertise on a new medium with a lot of momentum a solid investment.

Imagine Kevin Rose saying he's going to Burger King for lunch and 2 million people reading that within the next five minutes.
I'm dead sorry, Matt, but the votes the responses to you have gotten, on the whole, demonstrate why this place has gone down the toilet (in terms of comments - the front page links are still pretty good!).

It seems that criticizing you and calling you names is worthy of karma and that a reasonably thought out point is not. I'd rethink about where you spend so much of your time in future - I certainly don't post as much as I used to. I tend to vote you up though, because even if I don't agree with you, you at least put your case properly, unlike some of the name calling, emotionally wrought folks on here lately.
I'm not assuming malice, I don't care if he's intentionally being rude or not. A lack of intent isn't a free pass. This site gets visited by a lot of developers, probably a lot of whom use Python, probably a fair share of those use BS, and accusing the project of rotting, especially when that's not what's actually happening, could have an actual negative impact on it going forward.

Titles get changed here all the time, why couldn't this one be changed to just a simple statement of fact, something like: "Beautiful Soup switches parsers, developer requests help replacing lost functionality"? Instead we get this sensational and misleading title, and, yeah, it pisses me off.
I'm not sure why you would need 30 copies of X or Mozilla.

Either way, it is kind of inelegant, but it is hard to pick-and-choose parts of Mozilla. This is probably the simplest way to let Mozilla parse your HTML. (That, however, may not be necessary. I have done a lot of screen-scraping, and I have never encountered anything that HTML::TreeBuilder got confused on. Lately, I've been using libxml2, and that has also worked very well. Zero problems.)
In "separation of concerns" I'm talking about functionality, not human concerns. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns

Separation of concerns aims to produce modular, loosely coupled code.

Now, if we start from the point of view that they should be in separate files anyway (in the ruby way, each file should contain one class rather than many - and I don't think it's helpful to change that), then I don't see what difference it makes whether the files are in the same directory or in separate directories.

If you have any sort of decent editor, opening the file you seek should be a matter of pressing a shortcut and typing part of the filename... Certainly, I rarely use the mouse to open files - except when i'm browsing through a new project, but that's a fairly rare use case.

Now, there's another problem I can see with your proposed organisation: although in some cases (even many) applications are built around resource objects, almost every non-trivial application has many edge cases of functionalities that are not directly attached to objects, or are attached to multiple kinds of objects, or are attached to objects but in a way that could be mapped to one object or to another, and is actually best thought of as being linked to something else.

Forcing the file system to be organised around resources like users, projects, items, etc would coerce us into trying to fit functions onto specific objects - and, importantly, it would remove the flexibility of being able to not tie a function to an object.

As such, I think the current model is more flexible and offers something that your proposed model doesn't support and which is useful on most projects.
But that's not what the linked article is about at all. If you have benchmarks and you want to write that article, by all means, do it.
But, what if you’re in the UK, and you don’t want to leave. I’m 21, I could easily move to the USA

Unless there's something REALLY special about your circumstances, you almost certainly couldn't - unless you had that £100+k already for an E-2 (or even more for the investment green card option), were incredibly famous, have an existing business here you can use L transfer visas on, or had certain types of US family relationships. (I've wanted to get over to the US for a long while now, and am patiently saving up the sums of money required, so I've looked into it quite a bit! :))

Anyway, YCombinator isn't the only option. I'm based in the UK, started a business in 2005 that got angel funding from US based investors, and sold it in 2007 for a reasonable profit (though nothing crazy). It's doable. YCombinator isn't the "only" option by any stretch. Work your network!
SQL databases are a very poor fit for sites like news.yc. Things like threaded comments, for example, are hard to model efficiently. If you use an object database (or roll your own in-memory thing), though, it is very easy to model.

Relational databases are certainly useful in some situations, but there are usually better options for websites. You should consider learning about other options before telling everyone to use Rails. Rails is not the only way to do things, and it's rarely the best way.
Don't you find that humor feeds a positive cycle that results in it being inevitably over-represented in the body of comments made on a website? I know that is one of the reasons I can't stand reading the comments at Digg anymore.
The line cards in the Cat6k. The Cat6k is Cisco's flagship product, a layer-3 switch. By itself, it's an refrigerator-sized empty chassis. Add a "SUP" card to it, which is roughly the shape of an oblong pizza box, and you have something you can run Cisco's OS on. Plug line cards into it and you have places to plug networking cables of varying types. The line cards themselves have processors and various ways of interfacing to the backplane in the chassis.
Why did the same society that flocked to Star Wars decide only a few years earlier that the real adventure of going to the Moon was too expensive to sustain?

If Star Wars had cost several billion dollars a ticket and been ten hours of pictures of lifeless rocks, I predict it would not have been that popular, either.
Fancy typist.
routers like that are expandable with different cards (think 1" thick 20x15" cards) to interface with different hardware. you can swap them in and out on the fly to add more connections, replace failed cards, etc.

you can buy the router as just a chassis with no cards in it, which means it's fairly useless. depending on your particular network setup, you install the cards to support it.
I agree, that knowledge workers usually work until the work is done. But 16 lost minutes from DST, or half-an-hour on YouTube, has a cost. It may not affect whether the work is done, but it probably does affect the quality of the work done. It's a zero-sum game, and something's gotta give - either work quality or quantity has to decrease, or else time spent on work has to increase.

But it's a good question to ask. Maybe Tony & Co can tell us whether workers make up for this loss over the course of the week.
Make your project make you money, and then use that money to pay yourselves to work on it.

Seems pretty simple.

And if you can't make it make you that money, then perhaps it's not a profitable venture to pursue.

YCombinator doesn't fund "projects" or even "real projects". They fund businesses.
This video explains the mechanics of the single most important online business. This is how Google makes ~98% of its $20 billion/year revenues, and probably 100% of its $13 billion/year profit.

Online startups would do well to learn how this works. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten voted up more.
I tell people I am a "Professional web surfer."
The Amount And Value Of Twitter Traffic
I imagine that iPhone OS v3.0 has been in the works for awhile, far before the WebOS was unveiled. I bet there are similarities (especially if they revamped the Springboard app) but other things were just being developed while Palm was doing their thing.

I can't see folks at Apple seeing the Pre demo and scrambling to rip-off a bunch of stuff in the remaining months of development.
They are more objective and rational; that's what makes them intellectuals.
I think the minimalism analogy translates well to non-web applications as well. I, for one, love Transmission's user interface (that is, the program, not the embedded web server interface, which is nice too). It's super simple, displays all necessary information and nothing more. It uses smart defaults, and configures itself as much as it can. This is where applications stuck on your computer will hopefully go in the future.
Didn't work at all in my browser (Safari 3.2.1)
My wishlist ...

* Allow 3rd party have the same privileges as first party app

* Provide source code so you aren't working against a black box

* Intent based system for Activities^D^D^DApps

* Add Providers

* Allow you to self sign apps for betas

* Move to Java =)
In general, 3m is performing very well, much better than the
conservative collector plt used to use by default (the boehm
gc). As for the jit: many of the benefit of the jit are
irrelevant in Arc since it doesn't use mzscheme modules; this
is in addition to using an old mzscheme version, when the jit
was rather new -- many many improvements were done since then.
have lost their retirement

I would encourage people to not repeat things like this because they might convince a fiscally illiterate person (i.e. most of the population) that it is true.

If you had a million dollars in your IRA last year, you are highly likely to have about $600,000 now. (This is if you had a portfolio 100% concentrated in equities -- and if you did this close to retirement, well, there is no helping you now is there.) If you were planning on a 4% withdraw rate ($40k) last year, it is likely to remain safe currently: even with the 40% drawdown the market has seen, historically at a 4% withdraw rate you are overwhelmingly likely to die before your money runs out.

The worst case scenario for the typical investor is that they push back retirement for a year or two, which has large effects on longevity.

The big threat to retirements isn't transient financial difficulties, however disruptive they may be. The big threat is underfunding. This goes for pensions and individual investors. Your IRA/401k is NOT an emergency fund or excuse to go on a vacation between jobs, people.
Not sure about the choice of name (it confused me at first). Foursquare is a fairly prominent snowboarding gear company that has been around for years.
Game theory and the foundations of statistics
This is actually a pretty good introduction to dynamic programming. It covers some neat Python tricks along the way, too.
It is just an OS update - but a 3rd party app I have does a better job at reducing blur.

But don't expect too much more from the camera, the hardware is pretty weak.
Mind reading 'a step closer to reality'
Something that could be done for now, is to write a piece of
mzscheme code that "marshalls" the data in (utf-8-encoded)
byte-strings. Assuming that most of the 2gb is made of
strings, and that these strings are mostly ascii, this
should reduce the consumption by close to a factor of 4.

(I can imagine an interface that is transparent at the arc
level, where are strings are just passed to the backend and
retrieved from it, and the backend converts them to and
from byte strings. Later on it could change to use a FS or
a DB or whatever.)
Has Intelligence Been Rising?
Even though in fact I make some money from writing and none from programming.

This is humorous to me because in attempting to learn how to make money as a writer (online), I was dragged into learning how to wrestle with code, development and design. So now in fact I make more money doing those things than I ever did from writing.

So when people ask what I do, I tell them "it depends on the day." Not sure I've ever had anybody ask me what I am . . . though that could make for an interesting philosophical conversation. Dust, anyone?
America lost 2.5 million millionaires in 2008
Ostrich algorithm
Does anyone know how different this version is from the final version that went to print? The site for the book talks up the difference but is hardly an impartial source.
Following the internal link in the submitted page lays out the researcher's argument. A subsequent book he wrote

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=978...

gives a longer version of the argument. I find the sheer diversity of researchers who suggest reading the book quite remarkable.
PLT Scheme is not "interpreting" code. More than that, Arc
adds a bunch of huge overheads that could make things
substantially faster. I had some patches lying around that
made things around 4-5 times faster (including the news
server).
Random math Art in scheme - pics under nifty art
For completeness, and to keep with the recent meme around here, here's a web spider I wrote a while ago in Erlang.

http://github.com/michaelmelanson/spider
Where does Maple fit in here? I have repeatedly heard of it as an alternative to Matlab.
I tell people I'm a computer programmer, most of the time that's enough. Sure, that doesn't really tell them what I do, and sure, their eyes would glaze over if I talked about debugging or memory management, but so what? I don't really know what a brain surgeon does (besides 'operate on brains') and my eyes would probably glaze over if one started going into details of how they choose which scalpel or the details about _why_ they work on a particular brain.

Any complex job will be largely incomprehensible to people not in the field, if you think otherwise, there is a good chance you don't know how much you don't know.
That's a very interesting article, although I couldn't get the illusions to feel as the article predicted as I tried them while reading the article. The brain's map of the body is the source of "phantom pain,"

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/phantom-pain/DS00444

of course, and thus it is medically interesting to find out more about how the brain maps sensations to body parts.
Parallelizing Jobs with xargs
I tell people I am a Software Developer. I'm not a programmer, though software development occasionally requires programming. I certainly don't say Software Engineer, because what we do doesn't resemble engineering, no matter how much adherents to various methodologies say we do.
I loved this book when I was starting out.
This is entirely anecdotal, but I'll jump in on this topic:

I have twin sisters (identical). Both of them are highly intelligent (go to Ivy league schools), but one has a slight "edge" on the other.

Growing up, they did everything together- the only difference between the two is that the slightly "dumber" one, I used to put down a lot more and make fun of (I got along with my other sister a little better).

It's funny how the little things you do when you're young (we have a great relationship now) can affect things when you're older.
You people might be forgetting the most important point of abductions.

If you see an AMBER alert on the news, you will see it, and probably forget about it. You might see one on a site like www.woot.com but that is in a different state. Chances are you WONT REMEMBER IT.

Yet an application that can show you amber alerts for you current location would actually improve the chance that people would actually memorize the important faces and can always refer back to them immediately when seeing the child and boom press a button to submit a sighting or call immediately.

The fact that the information is readily available might be the missing key. Until now unless the picture is posted all over your neighborhood, you will have no idea that you just passed the abducted child.

The point is, this application has nothing but good intentions to the public good in mind, is free, is developed by volunteers, and can potentially do a lot of good in America... yet it is delayed for quite some time just because of apple's monopolizing process. The letter mostly points out that the apple store's only reason for being used is because there is no alternative, if one comes out or other platforms, it will be discarded because of apple's poor policies. The application is not perfect and the AMBER system in general has many theoretical flaws which are quite real even if given informational access through this app, but its not like this guy is making a profit from it.
Maple is Mathematica's main competitor.
Optimising Django on Dreamhost
Memo to CFOs: Don't Trust HR
oops.. yeah, i meant to put that. unfortunately, i can't edit the title anymore