skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of this great piece of coding/data mining: http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/#colors=ea977e,5c259a;
Totally agree.

One other thing I would like to add with respect to this article is that it reeks of a blog post designed to elicit a reaction by pitting two concepts with opposite meanings against one another. This sort of thing is useful when those concepts are concrete and discrete (lazy vs eager evaluation, for instance), but with something as fuzzy as success and failure you just make a mess by trying to place them in artificially constructed boxes.

This is in my view another prime example of people trying to think in binary in too many areas of their life. Success does not exist without failure, literally. Success is the absence of failure. They need one another to exist. Trying to write about how one is more important than the other is, IMO, a fool's errand.
There are things that can't be solved even if you know the cause, but the majority of the time identifying the cause solves the problem.
Follow The Hires: Twitter Looking To Ramp Up Search And Platform APIs
Interesting the IAPV was the first proposed reason I heard of - two years ago I think. Seems like the initial thought was the right one.
Smart is a nebulous idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
It would be awesome if someone could make a mosaic generator using these tools (if they haven't already)
I agree, I would expect the same behavior, but I don't think that justifies to activate a menu on a mouseover. Nobody would like an operating system that triggered menus on mouseover. It's just to easy to trigger on accident. I know I'm in the minority on this subject, because most sites do use that technique. Only site I can think of that doesn't is google (the more link off the homepage).
Wouldn't it? Given limitless energy, you can literally create matter out of thin air (E=mc^2) ...

You could create new planets, replicas of anything, etc. Hell, you could even distort time to fit your needs.

Granted, it would take more energy than exists in the universe - and a little technology that we haven't tried outside the lab yet. But we already have the fundamental tech to make that happen - it would just take a bit more scaling up and fine tuning.

Hey, he did say limitless
Adding L3 cache to a machine won't make it (noticeably) slower, but if the memory behavior is random and bigger than the L3 (which it isn't in bzip2's case but anyway) it won't make it faster either. But the point at which you want to add L3 is when main memory is very slow relative to L2, and that's the case when random memory access loses.

But hey, you can merge-sort a million records in only 20 sequential passes! Not sure how to apply that to BWT though.
The example picture has two sites with the same favicon, so the general-case problem probably isn't all that uncommon. Especially if you're the sort of user who does things like checking multiple twitter pages without an RSS feed.
"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" - Pratchett
I find this logic flawed. The problem Peter has is that not 100% of his friends are on Twitter, so he is not getting the response rate he does from Facebook.

It does not matter if 95% of your Twitter followers are not real friends, as long as the 5% that are choose to engage, they will see your posts and be able to respond just like facebook.

There is more 'noise' on twitter, but only people choosing to listen to it, are affected by it.
"Silicon valley's successes tend to never start companies again"

Really? I thought the opposite was quite true. Marc Andressen, Steve Jobs, Jim Clark etc.
Swift: making web applications secure by construction
For me, I've found that I start getting crazy ideas depending on where I'm and what I'm doing at the moment. I love going to coffee shops and seeing people interact, but this generally leads to more socially driven ideas. Contrastingly, if I were to watch some sci-fi movie, I'd probably start thinking about solar based electricity generation or building the next space ship one. Writing ideas down comes after a bit of inspiration.
Haha I knew there had to be a name to the trick of "launching' something without having it built. I use it all the time. ie. Before we added a games section to our site, I just put a "games" link up in the navigation to a blank page to see how many people click on it overnight.

One of my fav. talks for sure!
Moe,
Sorry, but you haven't convinced me. Yes, a very smart engineer with knowledge of all the internal workings of a web app can get by just fine. You seem to be one of those people. Congratulations to you! But not everyone is in the same boat you're in, so don't be so quick to write off new ideas, and certainly no need to impolite about it.

I pasted a link about Ajax load testing which, if you read it, explains why your "smart token" idea often won't work and will fail at a growing rate as apps get more complex (ie: as Google evolves to include Google Suggest). I'd love to have a substantial discussion about how one could write a smart recorder (esp. since I'm 99.9% sure it's impossible - I've thought a REALLY long time about it).

You say this approach is a "waste of ressources [sic]", but I disagree. If the cost is lower than traditional load testing services (thanks to the cloud), what's the harm in using a higher fidelity approach? To me, the "nonsense" would be avoiding such an approach!

Your point about persistent connections is another reason why BrowserMob exists. Why spend hours or days working around an issue like that when you could be focussing on tuning the system performance? Again - if the cost is low enough, why should you care that terabytes of RAM are being used in the process?

I appreciate your passion about this, but please understand that not everyone has the knowledge set you do, and not everyone tests the same apps you do. It's too bad you don't appreciate a unique approach to the problem even if it doesn't apply directly to you. Hopefully it doesn't turn off others from thinking outside the box!

Patrick
No.

Some of the best developers I know either A) Never went to college for B) Went to college and majored in English or Classics and taught themselves to code.
You could have a list in decreasing order of importance/fontsize... I think it's harmful to use a seemingly 2D representation when the spatial relations are meaningless. 1D (a list) would be enough.
I don't know about Tcl, but Perl's approach is anything but successful. I have a Perl app of about 40000 lines. It takes 15 seconds to create a single thread, and after it's done, Perl segfaults. Every Perl thread duplicates the AST, making memory usage bloat to ridiculous proportions. I found out that forking new processes is faster and uses less memory.
On Web Ads
Ask YC: What's up with Startup School?
Last year's was April 19, but this year's hasn't been announced yet. Is there still going to be one this year, or did AngelConf take its place?
Are you famous in your field?

What you need are credentials - doesn't necessarily need to be fame. Admittedly -- It's probably much harder, but you could demonstrate credentials through some other means.
You may want to filter some of the pics you use. The one you are using for Lance Armstrong has him naked.
Meh. The Nobel prize for economics is bogus when they rewarded people from different school of economics with opposite view on how the economy work in many respect.

Hayek got rewarded for his work on ABCT theory and the recent nobel prize winner Paul Kugman basically disagree with ABCT.
Seems unlikely. MP3 is overwhelmingly dominant as a lossy codec and the competition among lossless codecs is a lot less interesting because there's no format lock-in, since you can convert losslessly between them.

The only possible advantage I can see of another lossless format is a new DRM scheme, but the consensus against DRM for music seems stronger all the time.
Perhaps you didn't see pg's announcement.

http://ycombinator.com/party.html
Bellman, Dynamic Programming, and Edit Distance
I talked to a bee keeper the other day about CCD. Apparently, they have facilities that you can bring the hive to that will take care of killing the colony. They then use gamma rays to "clean" the hive. I didn't ask where these locations were. I assumed they must have been associated with the nearby university.
However, is there harm in getting dynamic behavior when you're expecting a full page load?

Moreover, it would be better for consistency between the javascript-enabled and disabled versions to use a click, which could be a minor win if one sometimes uses the site with javascript and without depending on what computer they're accessing from.
Mobile Trends: The Cell Phone Body Count
I'm using Yahoo BOSS search thumbnail service with Safesearch turned on; not sure why it doesn't pick these up.

Thanks for the feedback.
Ask HN: How Can We Make Our iPhone Game More Enjoyable?
So, my friend and I just released our first iPhone application. The app, called Green Wars, is basically a remake of the old game Drug Wars (aka Dope Wars). You can find the app by searching in the app store or you can find screenshots and a link to it in the App Store http://www.orangatank.com/greenwars. The game is free and doesn't have any ads.

We've had an interesting time developing the app (filled with all kinds of Apple hoops to jump through). Now the application has been accepted and we're trying to figure out what to do next. We've got the original gameplay pretty well nailed, but now we're just twiddling our thumbs wondering what to do next. We don't know which direction to take things from here. So Hacker News, we're turning to you for some inspiration. What would you like to see come next? Any suggestions for new features or gameplay options?

While we're okay with you telling us that the game sucks, we're hoping for some constructive feedback.
I think cool air would become a scarcity pretty quick. Instead, we'll have meters that tell us how much heat we're paying for.
Well, most of the time they are part and parcel of each other. :-)
I'm a bit skeptical. The circle is loved by designers, but it does not seem to survive in software that is actually being used by people. There are few pieces of software that uses circular control elements - the few that I can think of (the logitech mouse, LabView) don't handle well.
Yes I think you are right. Solve energy, most other problems will the solved from that. (the only thing holding back would be the side effects or fear of the side effects of accessing that energy).
I think you might be right, but I do wonder. Has anyone seen any scientific evidence one way or the other?
This is kinda stupid. It is much safer to be cynical about strangers.

Also, asking a stranger to "watch over your stuff" is unfair. You are burdening him with the responsibility of your stuff while their is nothing in return for him.

Everyone always acts out of self interest.
Happy with incomplete understanding of API provided your app seems to work?
Or do you feel you must understand everything completely to have reasonable confidence in the correctness of your code?
Gamer Deaths Leave Their Online Lives in Limbo
Like any other text that word-wraps, x and y are not separate axes. The two axes it does display are "frequency" (size) and "lexical order" (position). An ordered list can only display one of these.
Does it solve a problem that actually exists ?

I am having hard time seeing how "estimating an accurate age of a celebrity" could be worthy of a standalone service.
Shouldn't it be so that dead celebrities don't have an age? John Lennon shows up at 68 (which I believe to be correct) but that's assuming he was still alive, yes?
Primrose: subversive puzzle game by indie legend Jason Rohrer
There is really no reason that I can see to try and figure out why API methods do what they do. You send it something, it sends what you want back. That's basically the nature of object oriented programming, and why it's so popular. You don't need to know the workings of an internal combustion engine to drive a car, and you don't need or want to know what your API is doing behind the scenes in my humble opinion.
It doesn't. I just wanted to use Yahoo BOSS to extract some simple semantic data.
In this case, the design doesn't function as a circle. It changes to a linear list once you move your mouse. The circle is just there as a placeholder.

Have you used Raskin's music site Songza? It's a great example of circular navigation that works really well.
Yes, it is assuming he was alive :).

It gets the date of birth via Yahoo BOSS and computes the age accordingly, the date of death (if any) is not accounted for.
With frameworks, there's a design that it imposes on your application. Are you generally happy with an incomplete understanding of this design provided that your app seems to work?
Ants can form platoons (groups moving at constant speed) because they have the same destination.
And Python and Ruby both have excellent C bindings, you can rewrite CPU-intensive portions of your application pretty much anytime you need to.

Of course. But at that point you're writing your CPU-intensive code in C, not in Python or Ruby. Saying "Python and Ruby are fast because they can call C code" makes no more sense than saying "Humans are really good at arithmetic because they can use calculators".
I don't think Steve Jobs is a good example here.

One could argue that while Steve Jobs made a lot of money from cofounding Apple Computer, he essentially became a failure when he was ousted from the company.

If he didn't go on to start NeXT, his failure at Apple probably would have defined him.
Reminds me of the "find pictures on flickr by drawing" site Retrievr: http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/
There are much better suffix sorting algorithms available now than when bzip2 was first written. I'm sure bzip2 could be sped up considerably by using one of them if anyone wanted to bother.
That be great, thanks!
Are you planning on publicizing it on gossip sites & making money from advertising? Or is this just a toy project?
There's a story of a guy who wanted to sell cars online. But what a huge system to write, and he didn't know if it would work or not. So he made a website with forms etc, but manualated the entire back-end by hand. The backend was a mock up. This have him the feedback that the business could work.

But this approach needs ideas that people can recognize that they want. There's the story of the early xerography (xerox) process being sold to IBM - but they carefully assessed the need for it and declined:

http://ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm
Predicting The Future (Alan Kay)
What? My question was about startup school, not the summer funding cycle.
Invest to Stimulate
Is this not just a reality of this game? You mentioned Universities. For them 'fairness' is an independently important (though probably imposed) quality. Here there is no such force. Since there are always going to be application deadlines, it would take conscious effort or collaboration to avoid an exploding termsheet becoming the norm. Since it would adversely affect the lowest in the pecking order, you'll always have defectors.

A possible solution is more rounds. Even triennial intake is probably enough to let applicants time applications to meet their hierarchy of preferences.
Do nations go to war over water?
To support markessien's point:

http://www.radialthinking.de/radialcontext/

I used to love this extension, until it became incompatible with a new FF, whereupon I promptly ditched the mouse.

A point in support of neither: the circle is an excellent design element in gesture-related selections because all edges are equidistant from the center. Duh. The not-duh part is this: usually 8 arcs is the best division of space, but 8 is a bad number. It's not too big nor too small, and using the circle leaves you little wiggle room, such that you start constraining your design decisions to it.

When it works, it works great. When it is slightly off, it is quirky, because it is tempting to just throw in some extra options to fill up the 8 parts of the circle.
I get the feeling that "John" is a literary device for the alter-ego of the author.
Ok - well I figured that this could be done on a much finer-grained, case-by-case basis (?), but I clearly haven't touched on the issue in enough detail.
Maybe the real test would be what would happen if you regularly lost your best applicants in an avoidable way.
Block Buster Reports A Loss... blames bad movies... might be right.
Phusion Passenger has Debian packages.
It looks like no data was lost, which is really fortunate. And Carbonite may have been defrauded. But it is not reassuring to no that Carbonite was surprised by the equipment's failure. Their business depends on the reliability
of their hardware, so Carbonite should have been checking it themselves.
This link then.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494520
My own anecdote. If I'm lying in bed and I want to check a webpage, twitter, email or even ssh to check something on a server...

... and the choice is between picking up my iPhone, or moving a metre to the desk -- I'll just grab my iPhone.

Not to disagree with your point more generally, but I think the iPhone is operating in a sweet spot -- i.e. not the be-all-end-all, but good enough for a lot of daily tasks.
"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." -Neils Bohr
Balls of steel. This topic is so poisoned after Fleischmann and Pons, nobody touches it willingly. Well, looks like almost nobody.

But seriously, it's like the bugbear of research nowadays. No matter whether it would be possible to do fusion in those conditions, or not, people avoid getting near this subject for fear of tainting their reputations and destroying their careers.

Personally, I'm not sure what to think about cold fusion. On one hand, making two D particles stick together is hard. On the other, the D soup within a Pd lattice is definitely a complex system and, probably, still has some surprises in store. Time will tell.
Don’t Trust Documentation — Ever
That was the intention of choosing CSS selectors over robots.txt or nofollow, although a checkbox to specify following robots.txt & nofollow would be useful as you say.
There does not seem to be any straight forward way of doing this. This is because the U.S.A. immigration system is exceedingly unfriendly to immigrants.

I would suggest you look at other options. You can pay someone to marry you, that typically cost around 20-30k and there are services which takes care of it for you. While these are not legal, at least they can make sure you stay.
650 billion is a small number. A microgram contains much more particles than that.
Right, sorry I wasn't clear, I was only using their more recent adwords success (or lack thereof) now to extrapolate what their success would be on "buying a small amount of adwords and using a fake signup page to test a need, before the product even exists.".

If adwords isn't so good for them now that they have a fully functioning product and well known brand, can you image how much less successful running an adwords campaign would have been for them 3-4 years ago before Basecamp even existed.

It would have probably sucked, and if Jason only listened to this hypothetical adwords datapoint would he have said, "you know what, our adwords account isn't driving anyone to our fake signup page, we better not build Basecamp"?
Nassim Taleb on the Financial Crisis
I use it every week and find it extremely powerful. The custom dictionary and the ability to highlight exactly what is wrong are two key differentiating features. A grammar checker add on would also be very useful.
EveryDNS is down for the count
Marriage isn't an option really as I'm already married. Even as a thought experiment, it'd mean my family having to leave the country while I remarry and so forth.

If it comes to that I'd prefer to just leave with them and start elsewhere (english speaking and decent weather).

As you say though, the system really is unfriendly to immigrants. Even those with a US graduate education and cash to demonstrate they would not be a drain. And don't even get me started on the taxes I've paid.
(Warning: improvised English, this has been very hard for me, sorry)

There is a annoying effect that I can see in my city in most of the jams that I suffer. It's about the highway exits. The circular highway is usually three lanes wide. It has exits, many of which are slow (entries to the city). The exits take the form of an additional lane to the right. When the "contact zone" of the rightmost lane with the additional lane is long and the traffic is middle or heavy, the jam is a sure thing.

Why? Even if the exit has a reasonable speed, there are drivers that wait until the last moment to take the additional lane. There are so many that most of the vehicles that reach the exit are of this kind. If you are kind enough to take the additional lane as soon as it is possible, you get caught in a trap for ten to twenty minutes.

It's a moral dilemma. Either I am a good citizen and agree to be victimized for a quarter of an hour daily or I do the same to others. Please, don't ask me what I do.

It also creates a jam for the cars that aren't taking the exit, because the late changes of lane affect them. Not only the right lane, but also the middle one are filled with "late-exit-takers". And the slow cars have to change lanes to avoid the stopped cars waiting to exit.

I've observed that there is a disposition of lanes that prevents the problem: separating two lanes to exit and two lanes to follow on the highway, making the exit lanes long enough (to have a "buffer" for the slowness of the exit) and the fork instant, not a long "contact zone". But this disposition is seldon used and I haven't really made the experiment to be sure :-)

About the article: I don't think the ants are similar to cars at all. Drivers have freedom to behave differently, some are in a real hurry and we have different speed of reaction (to use the holes in the exit to wait to the last moment).
I lean on the nature side. I also feel like this is the dogma in "formal" neuroscience; it is hard for nurture to maintain favor when all you look at is whether some gene turned on or some phenotype expressed.

But, there is an area where it may be impossible to show either way, and you have a battle of religion. To see why this is the case, consider inherited fear responses (I forgot the actual term for this). You can, for example, probably train a goose to not fear an eagle-shaped shadow. There would be a measurable change in neuronal wiring, because the fear response previously paired to the pattern recognizers of eagle-shaped shadows is now inhibited or diverted. If this works, it is "nurture."

But to turn it around, the fact that you could re-train the goose would imply that plasticity was part of the equation. This is "nature." Then, there are parts where plasticity is simply never going to be part of the equation (without some extreme bioengineering): you cannot teach a modern goose to read, period.

So, to rephrase: it is possible to interpret all "nurture" phenomenon under an all-nature framework: it's simply a distinction of whether you are born with plasticity for certain domains of learning. This difference, which you can validly call nature vs. nurture, is meaningful in many contexts, but in my opinion is not so much a dichotomy than different ways of looking at the same thing.

I'm not all about predeterminism though; the important task to figure out what, why, how, and when circuits are plastic.