skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No content. It says they have a secret sauce, but doesn't say what it is.
I believe the original title was: Firefox Passes IE6 In Market Share (FINALLY)
America’s Most Popular Toys
Hmm, let's see. Things that I actually use frequently:

* Textmate
* VMWare Fusion
* OmniGraffle
* Microsoft Office
* SciTools Understand
* IDA Pro
* Visual Hub
* Little Snitch
* Windows XP
* ScreenFlow
I really appreciate your insights here, you bring up some really good points. I went ahead and wired in as much data collection / monitoring as I can so through the beta I can see how the service is actually used before I get too concerned with abuse prevention.
Much can be learned by looking at other fields which do complex "design based" work and are much older than Computer Science. In particular the various other engineering disciplines and the discipline of architecture. In these fields you go to school to get a broad-based exposure to the various facets of the field, learn the critical mathematics and language used in the field, get some in-depth information about some slices of the field which particularly interest you, and do some simulation of "real world" design work which involves the creative aspects, teamwork, etc.

When you come out of these programs you're neither an "Engineer" nor are you an "Architect" and using those titles next to your name is actually illegal. There is no expectation that the academic training produce a finished professional.

You then continue on another multi-year process of test-taking and working as an apprentice. Of learning the actual real world facets of the field. Facets which involve management, teamwork, business, people, design, how to deal with long, complex projects, scheduling, budgeting, etc. In short all the boring details which separate the dilettante from the professional.

Finally after you complete your state-mandated term as an apprentice you take some tests, submit a portfolio of your work to the government and assuming you are actually good enough you get your stamp, can use your title, and basically be counted on to do a professional job.

This system while cumbersome actually has a proven track record of working and producing capable professionals. Buildings often actually get built on time and budget and they rarely fall down onto people.
Web 2.0 Startup Lessons - What I did right / where I screwed up
If one keeps learning, dreaming, and building in general. I am just saying that no matter how many amazing things you've discovered, there's always more in store. Just never stop looking.
I got a letter from the Office of Thrift Supervision today confirming receipt of my complaint about E*TRADE Bank. Glad to know I'm not the only one who hates them.
Mr. Kundra has moved to post city contracts on YouTube and to make Twitter use common in his office and others. He hopes to allow drivers to pay parking tickets or renew their driver’s licenses on Facebook.

I'm all for technology and transparency, but this just sounds silly and gimmicky.
Scientists closer to making invisibility cloak a reality
Does anyone know where to get current stats on IE5.0 and IE5.5 use? I'm guessing it's below 1% if you look at a wide variety of "general use" sites, like portals and news, but it'd be great to have some solid data on that -- especially to show to clients who request that their sites support it.
This is the standard counter-argument, and it is of course valid.

However this has got to be a tiny fraction of total searches and total utility derived from search.

Also, how often is there breaking news in your neighborhood that's worth following at that level? Even if it's pretty close, but not literally in your neighborhood, it seems you'd be just as good with cnn.com or something.
Whoa, is there really that high a proportion of cute girls hanging out online, playing casual games?
Acrobat bug can lead to malware installs without even opening an infected file
I thought it was pretty clear that I was talking about "ombop.com" and not "omgpop.com." If you read only the first four words of my post, before accosting junior high girls, this would have been obvious.
I think omgpop.com is an awesome name, and I think that they're going to do very well.

I don't think that "ombop.com," what I assumed this sub-conversation was about (by virtue of replying to the post about it), is a good name.
This comment reminds me of people who complain about the design of Hacker News, and miss the point entirely.

Plenty of fish has a large and growing user community. I know of more people (personally) who have met dates on POF than any other site (though I am in Canada, where his community is strongest).
Scobleizer TV discovers SmallWorlds blows away Second Life
Thank you, Markus.

If just a handful of users are stupid enough to pay the fee to put a badge on their profile that effectively says "I'm really desperate" it will have the opposite of the intended effect, and maybe improve my chances. And at the same time they'll be paying for my share of the bandwidth.
I have always been intrigued by this facet of humankind, that people who are so poor can live life so happily, thinking about the small things in life. Maybe its about choices, the more choices and freedom we have, the more we miss the things we could have been, or could have done ?!
Yet it's incredibly successful...
An excellent recent book is Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ The approach is what you might guess from the title, so it addresses both the fun of Lisp and the building of practical applications (including web apps).
PoF is quite famous because it is essentially a one-man business, making millions a year: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...

It is also a scalability success-story: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture

So yes, the CEO (Markus Frind) is quite famous around here.
Their numbers for Safari are hilariously wrong; they suggest Opera has a bigger share (at 1.9%). Considering all other metrics seem to indicate Safari has a 3-6% share now, this leads me to question all of their other numbers.
Google shaking up earthquake searches
Paying for something makes (many) people value it more/be more serious about it. In that sense paying for "signaling intent" makes sense. Eharmony, for example, has always charged high rates and branded itself for more serious relationships. Of course it's dubitable whether this mechanism works in a larger community that is free.

On the ludicrousness spectrum it's slightly less ludicrous than virtual gifts, I'd say.

As for POF/Markus making more money that way, I guess it's like a game to him, figuring out what works and getting a kick out of beating (up) the big guys.
Zimbra has more users than Gmail. And they are paying.
Do we have to supply every submission with a mandatory comment regarding the title?

I mean that was your first reaction, right? After reading the post the voice inside told you "gee, I wish he picked another title, I better post a comment about it?"

And by the way, I found the title perfectly fitting and clever: we can bitch and moan about deteriorating US roads and infrastructure, about property values in California going down by 41.3% all we want, but that's far from another, raw meaning of "low".
Deploy Merb, Sinatra, or any Rack App to Heroku
Ah, ok! It's unclear what "it" refers to in the original response. In the OP "it" refers to omgpop, while in the first response it could refer to "ombop."

Anyhow, I agree with you.
It's a feature that we'll hopefully get added to the codebase eventually --- community revoting on titles. Bad titles are really annoying.
I don't know about cute, but a majority casual gamers online are female. Google "casual gaming female" and there are reports across several years. Some of them have the proportion as high as 70%.
Why All LMS’s Are ‘Pretty Good/Bad’
The Future of Health Care: Outsourcing the Patient
Computer Data Storage Through the Ages
Cruxle - World's first cross-media recommendation engine
Cruxle mines social networks and brings quality recommendations on the media sectors. For example, if you like a music, say Eric Clapton, Cruxle will recommend movies, books, TV shows, videos that you might like.
Writing good code requires you to perform experiments
The thing with $2 per episode is that once I watch an episode, I don't really want to watch it again (at least for a month or so). $2 per show is too much for 1 watch. Subscriptions are a better route IMO. I could watch whatever I want (new and old) whenever I wanted without commercials and on demand. ATT Uverse has something like this: We pay for the monthly access, and I can watch VOD (Video On Demand) - both movies AND tv shows, and I'm mostly happy with it. Hulu is my favorite option right now, but I can't go back and watch older shows.
I'm getting a Bandwidth Limit Exceeded message. Looks like talking about such a technology would bring huge traffic ;)
Study: free markets superior to patent monopolies
In my 4th year university project we worked on an expert system for a card game in Prolog... For doing an expert system based AI, prolog is pretty good...
Interesting how there's only one fitness loop comparing the accuracy of two polygon steps. This could totally be optimized with adding more comparisons to the fitness loop. This is awesome actually, and I have to say that this is one of the better genetic algorithm examples I've seen. 1k! woo!
Indeed, usually the $30 watch is more accurate than the $30,000 watch. After all your cheap quartz watch is 99.999% accurate, while your $30K watch is only 99.997% accurate.
I think that's what the 30 something business guys who decided on the name would say.
Windows UAC. Get Over It.
They are taking a side in the H1B controversy because he's an immigrant? That's like saying they are taking a side in gender discrimination because he's male. If he was actually on an H1B then you might have a point, but it sounds like he's naturalized.
Community voting on titles
I like http://creditrabbit.com quite a bit better, it seems there's just less mess to deal with there.
I find loud people who're so "misled" and "frustrated" by titles to be more annoying that titles themselves. Take this thread, for instance: one boring nerd wasted time commenting on "misleading" title, then another computer dork without life revolted, and you responded, and now look - all 3 of us are wasting everybody else's time on this stupid title!
The Happiness Project - Making Yourself Happier
Hey you can do this w/ python too!

<code>
dx = .000001

def deriv(f):
def fprime(x):
return (f(x+dx) - f(x))/dx
return fprime

def cube(x):
return x3

def printDeriv(x):
print (deriv(cube))(x)
print 3x*2

printDeriv(5)
</code>
unfortunately alertle is down, but good stuff.
It seems to me that class action suits would be next, since customers would have to had to pay more for stocks based on these transactions.
Well said. This is why I'm OK buying DRM-encumbered ebooks from Amazon. It Just Works, and I get a lot out of the experience.
I am not really surprised at this. If you ask for money with a good product, people often pay. A fact that seemed to be lost on many in the tech community in the last few years.
Wolfram: A New Kind of Search
Neat. The Pacific Rim of Fire is such a hotbed of activity:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&gl=us&ie=UTF8&#...

Just wish I could have figured out how to get the little markers to be different colors for earthquakes and volcanoes.
Sorry trapper but your entire post here wreaks of someone trying to "bully" the reader. You throw out a lot of esoteric terms w/ little to back it up.

That said - are we even arguing about the same thing? You responded to my post that addressed the "eating at night" myth and you're going off on effects that food has "over the next few months."
Earthquakes are a poor example. http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/latest.htm is going to give you more timely and accurate data than someone's random tweet.
Sweet. And how'd we get our hands on this? I want similar from other companies...
> Isn't it interesting that this country, which was filled up with everything from very low skilled to very highly skilled immigrants in the 17th, 18th and 19th century,

One difference is that low-skill workers could make a decent wage until, say, 1950 or so. The current US economy doesn't work that way.

> Meaning every immigrant and his family ... pay taxes etc

Folks who don't make more than median wage don't pay significant taxes. In fact, they're a net-loss, tax-wise.

> what about all the other people that would not qualify for h-1b but are still very skilled and/or ambitious?

Good question.
Want to Edit Excel Spreadsheets on iPhone? Now you can
Twitter rolling out integrated search?
"My take on Strauss is that he's a prep school kid trying to play Hunter S. Thompson."

+1 for nailing it. He's not nearly as insufferable as Tim Ferriss, but it certainly seems like he's in the same zip code sometimes.
It's actually pretty astonishing to me how many web sites don't charge anything. It reminds me of how Bill Gates gloats about the early days of MS how there was this huge hobbyist scene in software and very few were getting paid (not sure how accurate that really is but it seems similar to what I see today).

Developers of start ups should get used to the idea that it's OK to charge people for a service you provide. It provides psychological incentives to the buyers that they are buying something and therefore are entitled to a real level of service, and it provides real cash to the founders to properly grow the business.

Not to mention, it is trivially easy to start charging people these days, with services like Amazon FPS.

I really thought back in 2000 that companies based around the 'advertising will pay for everything' model would have learned their lesson, but clearly it's not the case.
The fact that Yahoo bought it probably helped gained more customers. They can push it to their existing corporate customers.
Why can't Google index Twitter posts just like it does everything else?
I'm sure mechanics feel the same way about the rest of us when we bring our car into the shop. Browsers are important to us but they'll never be important to "most people".
"I mean, submarines? Really?"

Yeah that's the point at which I would have declared the billionaire to be a complete fucking nutbar, and would decide to immediately stop trying to replicate his behavior.
More annoying than ad hominem attacks?
All culture is hacker culture -- agree?
Honestly, unless you want to spend the rest of your professional life heads down coding (not that there's anything wrong with that), a degree like that sounds more useful than bare CS.

The overwhelming number of problems you'll encounter on most projects aren't technical: they're business and people related. And people skills are harder to pick up than technical skills if you don't already have them.

My MS is in Software Engineering and on a day-to-day basis I use more of the stuff I learned in Project Management and Quality Control than just about anything else I learned. Even as an embedded programmer, I've never needed the cool analysis techniquesI learned in the Real-time Systems courses.
That's why Twitpay didn't go the "put funds into your account" model. We're powered by Amazon Payments, and to settle up and move actual dollars requires logging in to Amazon and approving the transaction. We're actually one of the more vocal critics of the "give out your Twitter password to any and all services", so we designed Twitpay to avoid the issues around that.
I don't see why that is a problem. While I don't think that this is really the whitehouse taking a side, what if they were taking a side? They should.
Link to my own blog. Don't know if this is considered poor form around here .....
Facebook hitting a saturation point with Gen Y users? HerHotSpot.com thinks so.
I haven't read through many of these here yet, but surely its advice wouldn't hurt. Doesn't look too much like your ordinary fluffy-self-help from my initial glances.

In some respects, hacking more happiness out of life might be one of the most worthwhile kinds of self-help things one can do. If you can be happy despite economic, social, or personal tribulations, you've got something right.
Going to the library or bookstore to read makes me happy. I just finished reading "Peaks and Valleys" (by the author of "Who Moved My Cheese").
peaksandvalleysthebook.com
Google does not have access to the XMPP firehouse (all tweets, the public timeline). More importantly, Twitter posts do not neatly fit into the page-rank concept (# of followers does not always equate to authority). Summize got around this problem by not even trying to address it - e.g. most recent tweets are first. Twitter is probably more easily gamed and adding Twitter results to their standard search would probably dilute average AdWords CPC.

Of course, the flip side of this is Twitter tweets won't be monetized as efficiently as Google keyword-based ads.
Films aren't constrained in length technically, but they all end up about the same length - probably related to how long one can sit passively for. What really drives the 30/60 minute timeframe? Is it medium or culture? Does shifting online really change that? A medium can change quite quickly, but culture changes far slower.
Why whoops? Burger King's Whopper campaign got shut down by Facebook, but that doesn't mean it wasn't successful.
There's a lot of hate for ad plays here on HN, and that's fine. (My startup is a commission-based model as well.)

But let's be honest - there are plenty of great, useful apps supported by advertising and lead generation where the end-consumer pays not a penny: Google, Yelp, YouTube, Zillow, SideStep, YellowPages, TicketStumbler, and so forth. And plenty of media sites make money on ads: Ars Technica, Pitchfork Media, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, and so on.

Let's not let the quest for ramen profitability distract us from looking long-term.
Overall, this article is of pretty low quality. Poor spelling, poor grammar, and near-zero insight. Also, the content is somewhat inaccurate. I don't read Digg any more, so I can't speak to the accuracy of its summary, but I still do use reddit, and I have to say that the list is missing at least two popular reddit topics: hating Israel and hating police. And hating Digg very rarely comes up.

I'm not really sure who the target audience of this article is, but I can't imagine that it's HN.
I use Zimbra at work (though we use the open-source version and don't pay a dime), and Gmail for personal use. They both have strengths and weaknesses, but I see Zimbra as the better professional solution. The search in Gmail is great, but no amount of tags can replace good old fashioned folders in Zimbra - especially if you subscribe to a bunch of FOSS project mailing lists - I just don't need to read it all that often but when I do I want it in one place. The calendaring system in Zimbra is useful for scheduling meetings as well.
Where are my $2 episodes that I can download legally?

You can get a large number of shows for free (and legally) at hulu.com No HBO/Showtime stuff, but most of the rest is there.
there is (sort of); it's available nearly in its entirety on Google Books.
I was making a joke... you know... with Google not-existing back in 1997 :-(
Shotput Ventures: new startup accelerator in Atlanta
Why anyone would want to develop for embedded Linux from Windows is beyond me. I work on embedded Linux all day everyday, and not one of the engineers at our company even has Windows installed. Honestly the time it takes to install Ubuntu is about 45 minutes max, and the productivity gains are well worth it.
Pairs Trading Strategy and Statistical Arbitrage
In search of the click track
Never do today what can be put off 'til tomorrow
Microsoft still owns about 20% of Firefox I think.
11 Ways to Find Brands & Companies on Twitter
A big question for marketers that want to connect with businesses on Twitter is that they often don’t know where to look.
OT: how come in Alextra the site is ranked very low, ranked l,000,000 +, and supposly has 22K subscribers?

Still I like it and subscribed to it.
It's not. Thanks for submitting!
Web 3.0...or internet recession
On Naming Startups (with Ruby)
http://www.bustaname.com/ is one of the existing services. Anything that lets you have more complex rules?
bad headline since it is only talking about paying users.
http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html
Ask YC: Link to a video previously posted
I've searched for every keyword I could think of - there was a video previously posted on HN - a talk about the relationship between the opensource community (specifically Perl) and some ancient temple that is torn down and rebuilt every few years.

Little help?
Link to the Archives: http://www.justin.tv/angelconf/archive
There seems to be a lot of game sites coming out lately. I guess they all seem very much like kongregate to me. This one seems to be more focused on multi player though which is nice.

Wonder if they will go for traditional games like chess, pictionary, etc at all.
the four concerns the author lists at the end are interesting for what they say about where he's coming from. to me, the joy of programming is more about programming than speed or efficiency.

that he also put 'harder to understand' and 'capability' in the list is confusing. he must mean capability in some kind of raw sense, whereas i see capability as having abstraction and libraries so i can get to the meat faster. again, abstraction is usually easier to understand.

perhaps when meat is speed and efficiency then our perspectives merge. psyched about 16 Mb of RAM!

btw, scheme has recently been replaced by python in the intro programming courses. snap.
Trust: hard to earn, easy to lose and impossible to get back.
999 Followers, or How my Twittering has Changed
Twitter rolls out integrated search more widely. Finally.
There is actual content about Twitter here (I have come to expect nothing less from Peldi).
The Economic Value of Popularity - Association Between High School Popularity and Wage Earnings
because Alexa rankings are BS
People who bought the iPhone have already bought into the notion that paying a premium you into a tier of exclusively higher quality experience. Paying for content once you have the iPhone is just an extension of, and in fact, a way of reconfirming and validating the decision to pay all that money for the iPhone to begin with.

It will be interesting to see if as time goes by the quality of iPhone apps decreases and tarnishes the expectations of quality or not. For now i think the gloss of quality from the iPhone carries over into an expectation about the apps themselves, so people are not nearly as wary of iPhone apps as say, I am about all the random shareware floating around in the PC market in the same price range.
Doesn't look too much like your ordinary fluffy-self-help from my initial glances.

I agree. And you might be interested in the author's c.v. (http://www.happiness-project.com/about.html):

ABOUT ME
I'm Gretchen Rubin.

I started out as a lawyer. At Yale Law School, I was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and won a writing prize. I went on to clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court.

I had a great experience in law, but I realized that what I really wanted to do was to write. Since making the switch, I’ve published four books. I’m currently working on The Happiness Project. It will hit the shelves in January 2010 (Harper).
sats v maxs is a good point, but shallowly addressed in the blog post. i didn't like how the research intoned one thing, while the author wrote the mother was a maxs just for fun, and that she herself felt guilty about being a sats. that emotional reversal doesn't make sense.

and that's the only point it made. meh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs ?
Groupably Poetic