skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dunno. something in the vein of Slashdot's OMG PONIES prank would probably be funny depending on the subject. Logging into hacker news one day and seeing nothing but discount tropical fish supply links would throw me.
Crap! I was going to finish doing PR for a release I did today and totally forgot it was April Fool's! What should I do? Do it anyway or wait 'till Thursday?
Also, why is Ruby seeing such a steep decline (-51%)? Does that correspond to the state of the Ruby contracting market? On the other hand, I wouldn't have expected to see such an increase in the popularity of Actionscript. Any theories on what's driving that?
parse & whitelist. Shouldn't be too bad, assuming you just throw out anything that even starts to look like bad input (make a super strict parser, and don't worry about css "hacks" like a real browser's parser would).
Consumers don't get a price break. They get shafted just as hard as the rest.
Yes, it is the language used to create iPhone applications.

Yes, the language is probably becoming more popular as more developers learn it, in order to create iPhone applications.

Since iPhone applications are still relatively new, and haven't hit their stride yet, book sales will increase rather than staying steady.

Ruby on the other hand has been "popular" for at least two years now, and it's natural to see a "decline" in book sales, even though the number of developers entering the ruby world may remain the same.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Ruby is relatively easy to pick-up and run with, while Objective-C is, uh, a bit more "complex" (for lack of a better word).
Am very curious to hear from others who have seen Wolfram Alpha in action. They did a lot to address my initial skepticism (which was extreme--see my earlier post), but it's no slam dunk by any means.
My first release since quitting my job: ShoveBox Mobile
Well, a bank could also say "if not us, someone else would".

"the disaster would still have occurred" logic is flawed.

Not that I want to blame the guy, he wrote an impressive article after all :)
I like the mandatory savings plan, provided it is offered as an alternative to social security. The thing with mandatory savings plans (such as 401k's, were they mandated) is that ultimately the money belongs to the individual, and you can effectively access the money as you like when you borrow against it. My point is that the people who are not likely to save on their own accord are the same ones who will effectively spend their savings through debt.
Media Negativity Moderates in March
Software that hides sales
For those of you who remember me from demo day but are scratching their heads: the Divvyshot iPhone app will be the second!
You should follow the Tapulous model and release multiple editions.

Such as:

ShoveBox Mobile: Battery Drainer Edition

ShoveBox Mobile: Weezer Cover Band Edition

ShoveBox Mobile: Mobile Edition

ShoveBox Cellular: Fart Edition

ShoveBox Revenge: Derek Smart's DESKTOP COMMANDER! Edition

Great Job!
Web Trend Map 3
I like this quote in the article: "...if you launch something you're not at all embarrassed by, then you've waited too long."
The YUI rich text editor is pretty damn good, especially when it comes to cross browser compliancy.
What does Apple have to gain in having Cocoa developers developing web-apps instead of desktop apps? (serious question)

If anything, I feel like it would actually be a bad thing: a web-app that looks like a (Mac) desktop app doesn't sell more Macs since it would run the same on any OS.
The Amazing Computer Science Diet
GM faced the classical agency problem where the interests of owners and managers are not aligned with each other. Usually, if the managers (executives) own 40-50% or more, OR own less than 10% of the share, their interests are well aligned with those of the common shareholders because if the company benefits, they benefit. It is when senior managers own between 15-25% of the stock that they tend to use their positions for their personal benefits instead of those of the shareholders. This is known as entrenchment.

For companies where managers own 0-10% of the stock, cash bonuses make them take larger short-term risks. A better solution is long-term stock options for the senior executives and cash for the middle or lower levels. However, as recent turn of events has shown, lots of companies give these kind of stock options to lower and middle level managers who ended up with their entire life savings in the very companies that went bankrupt. The senior management was getting extremely large cash bonuses and thus they had no incentive to care for the long-term growth of the firm.
There are too many publishers publishing books about Ruby. The market is really very competitive. But, you hardly see many ObjC books in the market right now. This may be the reason why ObjC book sale increases.

If you are using Ruby, you don't have to worry about memory management at all. But, if you are using ObjC, you have to worry about memory management especially if you are developing iphone application.(only iPhone doesn't have GC.)

Anyway, a GCC compiler can actually compile objC, so, it is not actually a Apple only language. Basically, any linux system with GCC compiler can compile objC too.
But those options are not available on all phones. The G1 for example requires T-Mobile's unlimited data plan which costs $24.99/month. (FWIW the iPhone is the same way, but AT&t's plan is more expensive.)
Would those down-voting comments please take the time to reply explaining why?
This may not be the best forum for this type of advice. You might want to try: http://www.reddit.com/r/Blogging/

Also, before you quit your day job, read lots of stories like this one:

"Time to Hang Up the Pajamas: I learned the hard way: while blogs can do many wonderful things, making huge amounts of money isn't one of them."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/183666
Enterprise flex development would be driving ActionScript. I agree with what jdg said about Ruby books.
Is anyone else getting a 404 for Google's April Fool's joke?

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html
Google Cadie
The Persistence Paradox
With much testing and reinventing of the wheel.
What are all those metrics on iGoogle and how are they getting fed out as RSS? (if you don't mind me asking)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78291428@N00/3402002605/sizes/l...
Chrome in 3d
AFAIK a lot of spam comes from botnets, which are stolen resources. Also, one might argue that spammers are just people who are too dumb or too chicken to engage in real cybercrime, given that it appears to be more profitable.
I can't tell if this is an April fool's joke or not... I know nothing of cat science.
Is Flex really such a big deal? I was under the impression that it hadn't really taken off?
It says "Page not found"
Not an April 1 Joke: Wieck Labs creates another Rack-based Ruby Web framework; Wheels
Do you think, each minute of the day Cadie's blog and video stream will show a tiny 1% cognitive improvement, making "her" 1.7 million times smarter by tomorrow night? We can only hope she finds humans as cute then as she finds pandas now.
Wait til Thursday. April Fools on the web is a complete mess and your release won't get the attention that it probably deserves.
The best part is google chrome in 3d. Awesome
I hope it doesn't becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM Eastern time, August 29.
We are handling this problem in exactly the same way that we handle people running no-script and/or super high security settings - ignore them. It's such a minimal problem as to be worthless to resolve.
Just curious, the about section says that you're a sophomore at Northeastern University. Is that out of date, or did you have a job while in college? (the title says you quit your job)
That would be a respectable April First project.
In the following press release, they don't literally say that "a native SDK is not needed" but I remember the keynote (WWDC 2007) and that's exactly the idea that Steve Jobs was trying to convey:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iphone.html

I remember him being very excited about their great idea that "Web 2.0 applications" was the way to go.

But yes it was clearly to keep developers happy (or to have an answer for developers at least) and create some activity around the phone until they could announce the SDK officially. The reaction at the time was pretty much "web apps? are you serious?!"
This is like asking "How do I start a profitable truck?", yes lot's of businesses are built around trucks and lots of profitable businesses use trucks heavily, but the trucking aspect is somewhat orthogonal to the business aspect.
Top Paid App in BlackBerry App World: PhoneyFart
There was another funny joke where Larry, Guido, et al announced they were going to write a virtual machine called "Parrot" to run Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.

It'd be funnier if they'd Ship The Damn Project already.
OMG PONIES was one of the best web april fools ever.
Ah, Google. I still remember the day they publicised the secret behind the speed and accuracy of their search results - http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Python PEP 401 -- BDFL Retirement
Maybe it is besides the point, but I use YUI grid. Not tried Blue Print CSS, but it took me less than a couple of hours to get hang of YUI. Never looked back.
You haven't had to deal with "social media experts" who treat Facebook as LinkedIn and friend me after meeting me at an event.

http://explore.twitter.com/sachinag/status/1122877566
You are not starting a blog, you're starting a business. You need to figure out what niche that business is in, who are its customers, how it distinguishes itself from other competing businesses, etc.

You will probably find that a "thin affiliate" site providing nothing but reviews of products which happen to pay you money does not provide people with an incentive to link to your site, join your community, revisit, or otherwise do things that produce long-term business value.
Tell evgen: Skipping over a few links one day a year won't kill you. I'd rather read an April Fool's joke than a post like this complaining about as-yet-untold April Fool's jokes. Lighten up.
Pacific Rim of Fire Earthquake and Volcano Map
It's Eclipse.
Or any kind of application thanks to the mess of standards that web developers have had to deal with. Atlas and Flex are an imperfect workaround for that problem.
I'm kinda curious about this too, because the conventional wisdom in the investing world is, "If the CFO leaves, short the stock." Does anyone know what Mr. Yu's next job is? CFOs of fast-growing, about-to-IPO companies don't just up and leave unless another really good opportunity comes along. Plus, if FaceBook grants options with a standard 4-year vesting period, I really doubt Mr. Yu's options have vested, which means he's leaving a lot of money on the table.
The Tao of Programming
The Tao of Programming
Isn't objective-J translated to javascript by a sort of compiler? in that case you can't easily re-use pieces of code and use them in your javascript application.
Parrot has shipped, didn't you hear?

Currently its only a mostly api-freeze. It still has some optimization issues and what not but hey its getting there.
We're moving our startup to Vancouver from Toronto (ideally) this spring. It's closer to the valley and the weathers much nicer.

Once I'm in the city I'll attend the HN meetups.
NSW missed Linux opportunity
Introducing Opera Face Gestures
While I like what I see in SASS and Compass. I'm afraid I won't be able to partake in the excitement as I code in PHP for my day job. And hack in Python during my spare time. Is there any equivalent out there?
This is not a long monograph about arc. It is a juvenile April Fool's joke. Do not click.
Junkmail is not subsidized by the USPS. Why would you think it is?
+1 for coming to Vancouver. My perspective is maybe skewed: two different YC companies (Snipshot, Auctomatic) have sublet office space from us, so we've been more surrounded by the YC/HN culture than most. But I would say that we at least have critical mass here, and it's a very nice place to be.
Gee, it's only 10:59pm here on the Left Coast. April Fool's starts early!
Why Microsoft wants more H1Bs
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Enjo, I back your position on this 100%. Dodgy, intentional marketing tactic from GS - no doubt about it.
Without seeing a demo, it's hard to say anything factual - but in principle, the "problem" in any well-design/near-perfect system is still human beings. (context, language, HCI, "true", "news" etc) So while it is possible that Wolfram Alpha has successfully modeled a completely new area of search/information modeling - more likely, WA is another novel way parse language and information.

Also, Freebase and Wikipedia might the competitors (I agree with Nova Spivak) - but Wolphram Alpha won't be a panacea until it's open source data/technology. The wisdom of the crowds is the only way to model... the wisdom of crowds.
Looks like a very interesting piece of software. Definitely something I would use if I used a Mac as my primary machine, or an iPhone as my primary phone.

That said, did you do both ShoveBox and ShoveBox for iPhone since you quit your job, or just ShoveBox for the iPhone?

On another note, the ShoveBox section of your website looks great. It's informative, easily accessible and clear. I must say it was a delight to view.
Vancouver has many regular meetings that would probably be of interest to most HN reader. If you're new in town you might want to check out these events:

Django Meetup (small hacker crowd):
http://www.meetup.com/djangovan/

Mobile Monday Vancouver (more business-y):
http://www.momovan.com/

Launch Party Vancouver(more business-y):
http://launchpartyhq.com/

Vancouver Python User Group (bit more academic):
http://wiki.python.org/moin/VanPyZ
Thesixtyone (YC W09) reinvents its brand, changes name.
I've also seen some of the SocialPicks guys cruising around.
Didn't pg once write:

It is greatly to America's advantage that it is a congenial atmosphere for the right sort of unruliness—that it is a home not just for the smart, but for smart-alecks. And hackers are invariably smart-alecks. If we had a national holiday, it would be April 1st.

So wouldn't posting a "gag link" epitomize the hacker spirit (or something like that)?
Parrot 1.0 was released a while ago. It's ready for production, now people just need to target their favorite language to it.

(Why you would ship something like this with no complete languages is beyond me. How do you know if your design "works" until is is running real code?)
The is_a(china, country) example suddenly made Alpha "click" for me: it's the "general knowledge" database that you feed to semantic web programs to correlate their domain-specific knowledge to.
I lived in that exact building for a couple years. The major downside of it and similar developments is that it's extraordinarily noisy from all the street traffic. Made me hate buses with a severe passion.

This is the major downside to mixing a lot of cars with apartment buildings. Many cities do this way better than Vancouver which is terribly overrated as a city to live in. For instance in Beijing the city blocks are very large with residential (schools, etc) on the inside and the major streets on the outside with little through traffic. As a result it's quiet at your apartment through the day in a city of 15M.
The page doesn't appear to be working in some countries (yet?). For example, I can't access it here in Canada, but using a US-based proxy, it shows up fine.
Interesting topic, earthquakes and all; are there any earth-science types among us? Anybody who can talk some Canadians into sharing their geological data? :)

I think there was some "inadvertently deleted" action on this submission yesterday.
I'm the other way around - I was like "This is going to be huge" starting around 2005, and now that everyone is using it, I'm like, "They're doomed." If I could short their stock at any market cap over $4B or so, I'd do it - and I wouldn't buy unless their market cap was under $1B or so.

Actually, considering I waited until Akamai was down to $150M before buying, and considering what Akamai does vs. what FaceBook does, I'm not sure I'd buy FaceBook at any price. Doomed!

I do think that Twitter's going to be huge though. Wish I knew how to get in on stock ownership for them. Alas, they turned me down for a job.
I like the new direction... seems more promising.
We are using couchdb on massify.com for an upcoming product.

The replication is handy, but in the end you'll end up sharding in the app layer, because afaik it doesn't add anything in that regard. We are a long ways off from dealing with that though, so I honestly don't know much about it other than setting up replication which is easy as pie.
A lot of effort for an April Fools stunt.. thesixtyone.com actually redirects to thesixtynine.com now.
Full-time Startup: Skribit Week 12 (Scaling)
In Australia it's after 5pm and I'm turning off the Internets for the rest of the day.

Roll on April 2.
dear twampss, i don't know what you're doing but I clicked publish on my blog 15 seconds ago and this was already posted here... it's kind of annoying. this has been the case for every single blog post of mine in recent past. sounds like you're using some RSS auto-posting script..
A bit out of topic, but the main reason I never really got into using webmynd is that it forces me to allow third party cookies... And I've never really liked allowing advertisement companies to give me cookies...

If there was a way to selectively allow third party cookies to trusted websites I'd be a happy camper though...
> In addition to my own products, I've also handled numerous consulting projects.

He was probably talking about that. Or,

> I have experience in web development in environments including PHP, Ruby, Java, and, under duress, C#/ASP.NET.

Also,

> I am a third-year undergraduate majoring in Computer Science at Northeastern University.

The Internet is a wonderful thing :)
Sounds like april's fool to me :)
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That's not all that much effort - just change the DNS records.

FictionAlley.org draws whole new cover art for April Fools, and there're usually like a half dozen different full-size graphics, one chosen at random.
Although SASS is built with Ruby, there is nothing strictly tied to Ruby or Rails. You can use sass as a stand-alone tool for pre-processing your CSS for any other web platform. Haml, however, is tightly bound to Ruby.
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The 3 Stupidest Ways to “Save” Money
thesixtynine.com is a great example of how experimentation and exploring new positions can really get you 'head of the market.

I used to 61 a lot, but now I'm 69'ing all the time and experiencing a new brand of satisfaction that I never thought was possible. These fellas sho' are cunning linguists - they're coming into areas that few have before. It's a consummate example of remaining firm at a time when others might experience performance anxiety.

I applaud your virility, gentlemen.
The edge of locality: visualizing a black hole from the inside
It's not so simple, there might just not be a workable solution. With email, you want to allow strangers to send you mail (there must be a way to initialize first contact). So it is not trivial to lock out the spammers.
SAHARA RAIN HARD R0CK SHOWS
What's more interesting is that there is really no benefit of doing so other than karma-whoring.. I wonder what his agenda is if he's using an auto-posting script.

On the flip side, I got to read your article and commented on it!
Me too, but I really think it would be cool technology
... and so the wheel turns - isn't this what used to be called a village? I'm all for not having people commuting between single-purpose locations.
Oh jesus, I actually fell for it...
I've been using it for a year and not had any problems (but only with this one plugin). Could it be that there are plugins out there that are specifically crap?

I regularly flip between full screen Emacs.app (with the elisp below) and then have a fullscreen, tabbed Terminal.app. Throw in Freedom.app and it's like canned productivity.

(defun mac-toggle-max-window ()
(interactive)
(set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen (if (frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen) nil 'fullboth)))

(global-set-key [?\A-f] 'mac-toggle-max-window)
Billion Dollar Charlie takes on the RIAA
noo my sixtyone shirt! it's already obsolete!

and this comes at a great time after i tweet tonight that i'm tagging all of my thesixtyone songs after neurotransmitters, based on the effect the song has. it's very fitting.

p.s. in case you're curious to actually see my tags: http://www.thesixtynine.com/#/jmtame/ (yes i've actually started on the whole neurotransmitter thing)
I like blueprint a lot ... but I'm also really liking 960.gs ... I think it might have a slight edge over blueprint.
True, after looking at it a second time, they've only changed their DNS and logo. The rest of the site is still the same and thesixtyone branding was left intact.
Nokia E71x on AT&T for $99
Thirded. I used it in my Rails help app and it was great. Easy install and none of the occassional broken layouts that I've had in the past with others.
How does it affect me?

First of all, you also run a start-up, so it affects you because they might turn on you next, for some slight misunderstanding.

Secondly, it affects you as a customer, because people who act immaturely rarely do so in a single area. They might treat you, as a customer, with a similar level of immaturity, if you tick them off.
I'm a calculus student, both my mother and father have been laid - off from work and currently I'm under loans, which god knows how am i going to pay off, i would really appreciate if you can help a needy student like me. Thanks for your consideration.
I'm a huge fan of thesixtynine!
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Everyone I know hates Thesixtynine. The old version was -clearly- better. I'm not sure why anyone would like this new version. It's far too hard to navigate. Where did they put the music part?
Alexa gets redesigned
It doesn't look like an April fool's joke. Google News knows of 4 sources for this announcement and Ian Duncan is a real UW-Madison neuroscientist.

Having said that, none of the articles about this cite the actual paper and no article by Ian Duncan or about cats or myelination or demyelination appears in the PNAS from March 30. Judge for yourself. :-/
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Ask HN: How do you figure out your market size?
They say you should figure out your market size. How does one go about this exactly? For example... my product is a time tracking application. I know there's a big market, but how would I go about figuring exactly how big that market is?
Jokes aside, that's a much more memorable name and I think you should stick with it. I can never remember the real name and only come back to your site when it's mentioned on this forum.