skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well as they mention midway through the article: it's not the URL, it's the analytics.

Number of followers is a very coarse metric for twitter popularity, it would be very useful to know click-through rates to gauge which content draws more viewers. Right now it's hard to tell which updates "sell" better than others.
I've used forests on a few projects. On the upside, the commands don't cause unpleasant surprises; it's easy to guess what they'll do. But there are still far too many extra steps to do simple things like clone a remote forest and get all the sub-projects up to date. They need an "hg jfdi" command.
Add "lose" vs. "loose" to your list. I am noticing this too often. I'm wondering if people are learning to spell by reading other people's misspellings.
Atheist here. Just had lunch with a really devout coworker. No stress. We talked about dating. Back in 2001 I worked for a company whose CEO was born again and who had prayed with his executives when the company was really small, a few years before I joined. I didn't have any friction with him. In fact, I haven't run into many obnoxious anti-atheist people since I left the shithole backwater town where I was born. When people grow up and enter the wider world, they learn which conversations bear fruit and which ones don't.
A Revolution in de novo Protein Engineering
The whole story about Rowling and her lawyers "going after," "attacking," or "suing" Scribd is a British tabloid fabrication. http://blog.scribd.com/2009/03/30/what-ever-happened-to-fact...
I guess what I'm trying to say is that user momentum is what differentiated Facebook from the countless other social sites that were sprouting up back then. Not anything inherent to the site. Consumer lock-in has only taken hold now that most everyone has already chosen the Facebook platform.
I love the reddit team's presentations. Does anyone have a video to the whole thing?

I'm guessing reddit uses BeautifulSoup just for crawling for images? I've always wondered how they decide which of the 100 images on a page to use for thumbnails.
It's about the real-time analytics, not the length of the URL
Interesting. My father took Prozac for a while some years ago and his creativity shot through the roof. For the whole time he was on it, he became an almost expert woodworker - something he'd shown no interest in before - making some great pieces week after week. Once he came off, within a few weeks he was back to programming again, but no hands-on creative work anymore.
Ask PG:  Mr. G, is it a promise?
Mr. G., Will applications submitted without yet having a co-founder still be reviewed by yourself, JL, RTM or TB?

Respectfully asked, of course.
Weren't there popsci articles 10+ plus years ago about how food scents are the most attractive... but obviously no one would ever make a food scented deodorant, that's just silly.
Putting Intel's Nehalem to the test
I don't think it's that straightforward. Loanwords happen overwhelmingly with vocabulary, and not grammar. While this is obvious, the implications are thus: the closer to script of the origin language to the borrower language, it is exceedingly easy to take the target word wholesale. Since the grammar is relatively stable, you can easily make the case that the loanword, whose origin is language X, is no longer language X, but language Y, the borrower's native language.

That is, words like "tempo," "crescendo," and "forte" are Italian in origin, but who's going to say, no, they're not English? They're native enough.

Now, let's take a discipline with non-English terms. Take Go for example. There are many terms in Go that are shared between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean schools. They can be written similarly in hanzi/kanji/hanja, with two catches: 1., the same characters are read differently in different places; 2., Westerners, using exclusively the Latin alphabet for their native needs, cannot read the hieroglyphs.

The result? What term should English speakers use? Pick one! Which one? Whichever! For Go, the Western world picked Japanese. You have ko, moku, seki... So which was the common language? There are now two answers. First, there was a common script, which was Chinese characters. Second, there was a commonized pronunciation, which came from Romanized Japanese.

It's not a "so happens to be" thing. It's a speed and scale of adoption thing, and in this way it is a "majority wins" game. And here, the winner is the Latin alphabet. To come around, I would suspect there are few disciplines that do not turn into a Latin-alphabet-standardized-, and in effect, English-, field.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/wikileaks.org
I think there have been quite a few startups accepted into YC with only 1 founder. Wasn't Divvyshot 1 founder initially?
Rails has really kept up its development pace nicely. Nested assignments and forms are a wonderful addition. Dealing with related data (in forms and saving) had always been quite a pain and they've done a great job of making that a lot easier.

Some things not mentioned in the slideshow that were important (at least in my opinion):

* Dynamic scopes: you can say Article.scope_by_XXX and it will allow you to use scopes without explicitly naming all of them.

* Batch processing: this allows you to get the results of a query in smaller batches so that you don't have to load everything into memory at once.

* Rack support: it's nice to have Rails being able to be deployed in the way that the community is going for Ruby apps.

* Try: probably one of the best additions. It allows you to say @person.spouse.try(:first_name). Normally, if the person didn't have a spouse and you did @person.spouse.first_name you'd get an exception saying that nil (which is what @person.spouse would evaluate to) doesn't have a method first_name - which is true. This way you don't have to keep saying, "only call @person.spouse.first_name if the @person has a spouse".

* Application Templates: These are basically shortcut files you can make for setting up a new project. We all have slight variants and we can set up the default things we want in all our applications so we aren't starting from such a blank slate (and that way you don't forget to do things like create a .gitignore file before you put your database password out there for the world to see).
Let's make an analogy to software. Let's say there is this amazing piece of software that everyone loves, and then the developer decides to stop developing it. Should someone else have the right to expand on it, since so many people stand to benefit? Harry Potter is a cultural icon, and the Encylopdia increased the value of it. The writer of it was a huge fan who wrote the entire thing as a side project. There was no corporate backing until he tried to publish it, it was all done out of a love for the characters.

Wow, this comment is -1 as well? What's with the new people on HN today.... go back to Reddit/Digg please. As the request of the below poster, my rational is that my view, while not the same as yours, is reasoned and made clearly.
US workers waste $2.8 billion/yr by failing to shut off their PCs at the end of the day
It's sad that our society values and rewards extroverts so much, that introverts like the author feel the need to alter their minds in order to fit in.

The very existence of the tweeters and facebooks tell something about that need to reward extroverts.
Indentation is meaningful just like in Python:

"There are two special considerations for newlines in the syntax. The purpose of this is to allow nesting structure to be indicated by indentation rather than by any kind of explicit bracketing."
CSV or XML?
This brief video tutorial explains the pros and cons of each?
I'm unsure of the scope of the or, but assuming it's the narrower: yes, every application gets reviewed by at least one human.

When there's a class of applications we don't want to get (e.g. from groups none of whom can participate in person), we ask people not to submit them.
Interested in better online appointments?
My after-hours project is getting close to being ready for use. Part of the way it works makes a "limited" beta difficult to do, so I'm collecting registrations from people with an interest now. Let me know what you think of my (minimal) landing page, and register if you'd like to be told when it's ready to go.

http://sixleaf.com
That's a big maybe. I'd wager that a small percentage of the people who use bit.ly to shorten links are actually using the metrics. And I agree that bit.ly could probably be cloned trivially. There's no network effect, so there's no real reason to use bit.ly over any other service.
It does for me. But you can get some false positives this way. There are some smart people who can't spell well, e.g. because they're dyslexic.
Scribd promised to be pro-active when attacked by the SFWA, which I thought at the time was exactly the wrong tack, for precisely this reason: once you've set up to monitor the system, you can't use safe harbor as a defense any more.
Indeed. That's integrity.
This is not a story about 2nd rate thinking or a mediocre or bad software product. When a freshmen flunks a semester because he got a new video game, it is not because the video game's designers were 2nd rate.

And Wall Street attracts people seemingly as smart as you would ever want to be. Read Roger Lowenstein's "When Genius Failed" about how a coupla Nobel Prize winners in econ started a hedge fund (Long Term Capital Management) which blew up spectacularly in 1997. Other smart people knew what they were doing wrong, but that didn't matter to the people who saw how much money they were making over the few years they survived.
An intro to web hooks
Is there a new player in the web integration space? This tutorial walks you through the ins and outs of web hooks.
Mostly because computers boot so slowly.
Dumb question:

I understand how URL shorteners work (hash the URL)

however, how do they make money?
This is an example of projecting current trends and projecting them far into the future. Those of you who remember Popular Mechanics from the 50's can recall flying cars, nuclear energy too cheap to meter, atomic powered planes, domed cities on the moon, etc. Sure, the urbanization trend will continue for a decade or two. But if you project some trends we already know about: an information based economy, ubiquitous very high speed internet, and robotics, the need for super-megalopolises is less apparent. My SO and I live in a town of 7K with a nearby city of 50K, and LA and SF are 4 hours away. If high speed intercity rail became as common as pre-1940's passenger rail, we would be half an hour from fast transit to anywhere. I dont see a need to live with 20M other folks.
thanks for quick reply, sir. make it a great day.
Being fluent in both English and Chinese, I would have to say Chinese grammar is much easier than English. There are no irregular verbs or pluralization, and very few tenses. The difficulty in going from speaking English to Chinese is vocabulary memorization and pronunciation, but that's true for going from Chinese to English as well.
I know some people who believe in God pretty well, but I don't blame them. I've realized they're not stupid, they just don't give it any critical thought and at same time it's a socially acceptable position.
when they are sliced for specific dimensions, then, yes, the semantics should be a default property of the result. When sliced and diced for obfuscation, not so much. If they were indeed obfuscating purpusefully, then there is a fraud case in here. This however does not make the technique guilty by association.
Harry Potter is first and foremost a book series. Anything more is based on the author's benevolence or interests.

Once Harry Potter is published, it's out there and it's done. The series lies in those printed novels. That doesn't change. If Rowling wants to let people add more, she can, but it is certainly not a requirement.

Similarly, I absolutely have the right to suspend a software project of mine and leave it hanging, if that's what I want. Perhaps I don't want something associated with my name being sullied by other people's work. Maybe I want it to be associated with me and only me.

The fan was terrific, but he tried to make money. Rowling told him she was against that and he did it anyway. So it wasn't like she lied to him.

By the way: I downvote people as soon as they ask about why they're being downvoted, unless they're giving a good rationale for why they shouldn't be downvoted. Maybe that's why the negativism?
I like your comment. I think once something enters our culture we all really own it regardless of who created it, regardless of copyright law. (Read Free Culture for a much better and nuanced explanation of this.)
Python Developer - Hacker Level 
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They are looking for high-end computer geeks. This means that they don't want typical application developers, they are looking for people that eat, sleep and breath technology. When they go home from work they have their own server farm at home where they write software for themselves. A real geek.

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Hard-Pressed Colleges Accept More Applicants Who Can Pay Full Cost
You can't blame yourself for what inevitably happened. It's the people who put only best case scenario numbers into every variable in the risk modeling. And even if you removed that from the equation, you were just providing a product banks wanted and if you hadn't someone else would. The disaster would still have occurred.
Ask HN: What actually causes a computer/program to run slowly?
A friend of mine asked and I couldn't answer. Maybe you guys can help me out.
Of course you can suspend or erase any software you write at any time. I believe this changes if your software gains widespread cultural importance and acclaim. There are responsibilities that go along with creating something so important. I swear, if Take Me Out To The Ball Game was written today, we wouldn't be able to sing at baseball games because of copyright.
"While I like the mindset that says you should be open with your creations, I respect the one that says your ideas are your own"

I think one of the strengths of the American IP system is that, while you can call your ideas your own if you want to, you don't have the right to control their reproduction or distribution. To quote the 1976 Copyright Act:

"In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."

The only way you are allowed control over the distribution of an idea is through a patent, which is only granted under certain circumstances and for a fairly limited time. This concept that ideas are not subject to individual ownership, but rather common ownership, has myriad benefits, among them the right to critique ideas and a bias toward spreading good ideas as much as possible.

Of course, in the particular case of characters and story in a book it's harder to say what is idea and what is expression of that idea. To quote wikipedia, "Courts disagree on how much of the story and characters of a copyrighted novel or film should be considered copyrightable expression."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_copyright_law#Ide...
Not even close!
I don't think you'd want to hear it, but whereever a huge amount of money is, you will find some of the world's smartest people.

People and businesses don't make such astronomical amounts of money just on sheer dumb luck. They do it by being very smart, knowing the system and analyzing it for maximum profit. Of course, human nature being what it is, wealth can cloud the vision of even the smartest people, leading to the situation we have now.

But don't think for a second that Wall St. is populated only by "lower tier" thinking.
A badly chosen algorithm can waste immense numbers of processor cycles doing something that could be done more efficiently with a better algorithm. Sometimes a bad algorithm can run into memory size limits or other issues that stop execution completely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_efficiency
Loving the new design - the last one looked like a giant advert and I was always worried that I'd hit a placeholder page.
I wonder if they realize their motto is grammatically incorrect.
At my previous work (.NET shop) the entire IT department switched to an English Windows and Visual Studio, for the simple reason that it was impossible to Google errormessages in Danish. It was a significant boost of productivity and morale.

Re. Danish - at my first day at Comp Sci at Tech. U of Denmark, I had no clue what this "oversætter" (literally "translator") they were talking about was. Turned out to be term coined in the 1970's for what I knew as a compiler. Esp. among older staff there, they still use the Danish term.
One of the issues that has always bugged me about this is the issue of context - medicine has a great track record in treating emergencies, but fares quite poorly with preventative care and chronic illness.

The issue arises when people associate the good track record of emergency care with preventative treatment - so essentially take what's prescribed as gospel.
Would you take investment advice from a great pig farmer? Dental advice from a good banker? Art advice from a physicist?

I would imagine that pharma will have to tread very carefully over the next decade, as the cumulative resuls of drug-trials like these start to create an interesting track record. However, spin-doctoring is everything....
VC Trends and Q1 Recap
> However, software is complex, and complexity has to live somewhere.

Exactly. This argument comes up in a lot of topics. For example, that pure functional programming is easier to reason about. True, but as soon as you have to simulate state it's more complex that just having state. This is also the reason that pure functional programming isn't automatically parallelizable. Data dependencies don't magically go away.

Same thing if you are simulating object database features in a RDBMS.
Microsoft To Shutter Encarta, Read All About It On Wikipedia
Something rings so true about this. Treat your customers like you actually like and trust them. Give them more reasons to give you money, and they'll gladly do it (special editions, re-releases, etc).

The author could take advantage of his customers' desire to hand over money by offering something in return, satisfying his need to engage in trade rather than charity. Everyone would be happy. Customers get more stuff, he makes more money, and no one feels like they're getting shafted.
These trends, projected far into the future, evoke points of conversation along the lines of "The Singularity" which as been a recent hot topic here on HN.

You touch on a great notion that for some trends, projection makes relative sense (especially in IT). Trends like population seem a little less sound to me; these could be easily interrupted by so many destructive factors (disease, politics, genocides...) that it seems somewhat senseless to plot.

I could be wrong though, and the population trends could be more stable than anything.
And install that wordpress plugin that hides wordpress version meta-tag from page source (there are several of them)
That's not what he asked. The question is "can it be measured?" and it can: http://www.clinchem.org/cgi/content/full/44/1/155 and http://www.springerlink.com/content/tq58032421q41q14/ and
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/110436914/abstrac...

I write code for medical devices for a living; if a substance found in the body is therapeutically interesting, then someone, somewhere has built an instrument to measure it :-)
Perhaps wall street only gets second tier engineers, scientists and mathematicians?...I think if finance firms went to the trouble of hiring people who have better options they might not be in so much trouble.

There are quite a few fantastically smart people on wall street. It's quite easy not to care about being an N-th class citizen (for N >= 2)) when you make $500,000/year before you are thirty.

The trick is to be both a first tier programmer/scientist and to be able to put yourself into a situation where those skills matter.
True, but it's a temporary situation. As an old teacher used to say: you could wake a medieval scientist in the middle of the night, and he would probably curse at you in Latin. Same holds for present day scientist and engineers (myself included), only they would curse at you in English.
Exactly. It's the only reason I use bit.ly; so that I have a basic gauge on how many people clicked through, and when.
Worst thing for me (and I think quite a few people) is the misplaced apostrophe. We have a big sign just outside the town here that has "Special's" in big bold writing - now I can't even take the store seriously....
Happy Birthday is copyright, and people using it in movies pay a royalty.

Find me the thing that says that if I make software, I lose rights to it once it gains "importance and acclaim." Perhaps I can't ERASE software, but are you saying I can't stop IMPROVING it just because it becomes big? Because that's just silly.
Eh, but such a slippery slope lies that way, no?

3rd party how-to-use X guides? Software training videos? The content at gamefaqs? Microsoft office for dummies? Cliffnotes? Sparknotes? Test prep? Movie reviews?
One thing that's interesting to me is that they clearly view each of their changes as being an improvement, but do they have empirical data to back that up? According to this copyblogger article, it doesn't sound like they had any metrics for the first few iterations at least...perhaps things have changed.

http://www.copyblogger.com/the-37-signals-approach-to-copywr...
Python Developers Showed up to Change Their Country Today
Most of the time a slow program is waiting on input/output to slow devices, like the network or hard drives.
Badly chosen algorithms can also lead to slow applications.
So that means Rowling has no control over her fantasy universe, even when it's just reflecting what she wrote?

I think that people should have some rights in terms of expanding on what she wrote, for instance. But that encyclopedia was just reiterating what had been written in the seven novels. It wasn't adding anything new.

(As for character control: Rowling spent years building her universe before writing a single word. I think it would be pretty awful if she didn't get some sort of recompense for the people who use those years of planning and make a quick buck off of it. But I'll admit that I don't know whether or not copyright law protects something as conceptual as a character design.)
I've read that some modify destination URLs to include their affiliate code (links to amazon.com, for example).