skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope that bet is right. Even so, there must be a way to avoid this kind of response. Sometimes debate to get into the news is good, but I think in this case it would make more sense to have the response be "Facebook releases awesome interface!" Apple was able to do it with the iPhone and while there were people who didn't like the pseudo keyboard, the raves far outweighed the complaints.
I really don't think of this as drivel. I knew a couple high school wrestlers, and weigh-ins are very important. There are all kinds of strategies to make weight, and then rapidly gain weight.

It's a necessary thing to do if your seriously competitive in sports that have a weigh-in. Just think about it, weight classes are so that people are appropriately matched. Most people try to lose weight before a weigh in, so if someone doesn't it would be competing against people in a weight class above him.

The discussion in the comment section is actually really good. Tim Ferriss makes a few interesting statements.

First, he said that making weight was against the spirit of the competition, but until rules changed it would be a necessity.

He also mentioned that this method does not hold a lot of attraction for people with eating disorders. It makes people look like zombies. He said that he had coached female athletes with eating disorders and that these methods were very unattractive.

He did say that this method was dangerous. But cutting weight was extremely common in athletics, so he wanted to lead people to the method that was the safest and had the least risk of organ failure.

I do think that he should have emphasized more in this article that not even this method is safe, just less dangerous.
Agreed 100%. Without an organizing force behind specific implementations of this sort of technology, it's just technology.

Reddit has a Chicago Subreddit. Meanwhile I run a social news site for Chicago. One (my site) is more interesting than the other because we're actually putting people, thought and energy behind it.

I'm more interested in creating better incentives for people to use existing tools to cover their communities.

I think you do this by:

1. Getting them better data - City governments are far from transparent. Newspapers get info out of them at great expense and then sit on it, because it cost them so much. Everyblock, Sunlight and organizations like that are hammering away at this. If you give local bloggers access to better data, they can bring you better coverage and have more fun.

2. Getting them tools to build an audience - Let's say you want to start a blog about businesses in your neighborhood. How do you get that initial bump of traffic to the site? When you have a really good story, how do you share it with your city? If you go to the newspapers, odds are they'll write their own version of your story and not even link to your site. I'm working on WindyCitizen.com to attack this one, a social news site for and by Chicagoans.

3. Get them ways to make $$$ - A lot of folks aren't in it for the money. But if you can make even a few hundred bucks a month off your local blog, that's enough to make it interesting for folks. There are about 10 local advertising startups floating around out there. No one's come up with a really good solution yet. I'm thinking this might be another organization, rather than technology problem.
Proof-of-concept exploit: Intel CPU cache poisoning
Hah, read up on the Navy's railgun tests. They're expecting accuracy of 5 meters at 370km's.

A bullet loses no energy to gravity, it just gets converted into potential energy. It also loses little energy to the atmosphere, it retains about 90% to impact.
I agree it's worth discussing (especially if you're unsure about future malleability of the web framework to your needs), and I apologize if I was excessively curt.
Data Visualization Is Reinventing Online Storytelling
This feature is quite old ... statuses have been "is"-free since roughly the last overhaul, which was what, a year or so?
Brilliant article. Prob one of the best things I have read all year long.

WOW! Should make a movie about it.
When I was interviewing for jobs to get out, I encountered close to a dozen ex-Amazon folks... none were at all surprised that I wanted to leave, and one even said that he only joined Amazon for the resume pad.

My experience was basically that they hired me because "senior developers should be good at wading into bad code" rather than for anything vaguely resembling the sorts of engineering tasks that they grilled me for during the interview process.

Most of the software I got stuck with was a nightmare of bad design and rushed hacks. It was also a technological step backward from a government contracting job.

And then there's the problem of supporting all of that crap...

And the benefits aren't all that good, to boot.

Most of the developers I've talked to who worked there didn't like it, and the more senior they were, the less they liked it.
Everytime single time that Facebook has changed the design almost everyone hates it and everytime almost everyone grows to like it.
What can actually be accomplished with Twitter?
the number of respondees or the proportion responding a certain way are irrelevant if the sample is biased.

Correct. Ordinarily, the ABSOLUTE size of a sample is more crucial than what percentage of the whole a sample makes up, for determining whether the sample is adequately large, but that is only if the sample is unbiased. If that precondition is not met, don't talk about how large the sample is, talk about how badly self-selected "samples" can misrepresent the characteristics of a population. Thanks for reminding HN readers about this important issue.
FWIW, that isn't a fault of the framework per se; I have had no problems with Pylons doing something it shouldn't have done. You have to understand what the code is doing, and each framework has a different learning curve, but in my experience Pylons is as usable, expressive, and understandable as Django.
Clearing some SDD FUD
An excellent way to figure this out would be to apply some sort of machine learning technique. Perhaps an Active-Appearance-Model or some other statistical measure to mathematically represent the shape and texture of an "untrustworthy" face as a lower dimensional vector. Then train classifier on this data which can discriminate between "trustworthy" and "untrustworthiness". Of course, there are going to be ethical concerns, but this is definitely one interesting way of doing it.
I agree with you. I'd even go as far as saying that some data should be freely provided to companies to be resold. It would allow businesses to make better products, and give them an incentive to help customers better use the data.

I'd like to say that I'm only ok with public data being given to companies when there are no major privacy concerns. I'm not ok with the state selling lists of people's phone numbers who aren't on the Do Not Call list to telemarkers. I'm more referring to a recent story where a town in Michigan blocked a company from getting information on parking spots from their website.
Wow... really cuts to the heart. I am guilty of some of these "productive procrastinations" as well (including the beloved HN) and find that when I close all not-super-necessary tabs (even gmail), I can focus way more on the famous 20% stuff.

Yes, this 80/20 advice is nothing new, but the "case study" with his actual protege is a great way to really see it in action.
The way the article totally changes course on the last page is brilliant. This might be the only news article I've seen that used the hypertext format that well.
If you want to deal with tickets offline, you can use SD:

http://syncwith.us/

I don't know what the status of the Trac support is, but it should be easy to add.
Pylons rocks my world!
Some means of demonstrating the fidelity of an idea - either through formal proof or empirical evaluation - is expected of all scientific and engineering papers.

There are lots of interesting ideas that don't work. The value of knowing an interesting idea does work is enormous. Evaluating ideas is the basis of the scientific method.
There was a live chat with the author on the Washington Post the week this was published. Someone asked him if the paging was set up this way on purpose and he denied it.
If I am giving someone equity from an equity pool - I wouldn't consider them a founder. But that may just be semantics. Bringing in another founder down the road could work - it would just be a non-trivial decision to make regarding the split. Which slightly differs from what I originally, but I didn't mean to say I would completely rule that possibility out.

I definitely agree if you want to get and retain good people, having headroom in your equity pool is important.
Yeah, Parsec is great - I used it to parse some shading languages. I have thought about the error recovery problem, and I think for some C-like languages there might be a solution, although I never tried it. You could use a "smart" lexer that divides the incoming stream into functions (based on counting "{" and "}") and run Parsec separately on each function. I can't think of anything much better...
for me, nicotine is a much better hacking drug than caffeine.
Yeah I really agree. it seems like most of these posts are saying anyone can make 100k+ working a couple days a week just by finding the right job. Sure, it's possible. But people do it by finding a niche, and marketing themselves very well. And there isn't usually room in these niches for many people to make that kind of money. These posts usually remind me of those late night tv infomercials telling that I can make millions, I just need to spend a few hundred to learn how to do it.

I think that people can make that kind of money with little work, but they don't do it by following a defined career path.
This post is giving bad advice. It sounds like good advice, but it's bad advice. Let's say I'm looking to buy an FTP client. What do I do? I'll search for FTP client on google, take a look at the first 5 clients, download and install the ones that look interesting and have about the same feature set, then buy the one that is easiest to use/and or cheaper.

New customers coming into a market do not have preconceptions about who is the biggest or the best! That's the fundamental flaw in the argument.

The correct way to take on an established product is:

1. Offer all their features

2. Make sure you are visible on the same locations as they are

3. Offer more value for the money

4. Be more convenient and or easy to use
Both for me, I dont enjoy coding for the sake of coding, I enjoy the process of creation.
I was referring to the founder split in the company. Providing an employee option pool or raising funds would equally dilute the founders.
In good news, the security conscious part of you needs to stop browsing the web in a graphical browser now, because all the competitors were also hacked in a similar manner :).

/me ponders how secure lynx is
The killer feature of github for me is their network graph.. it would be great if they could copy it, and open source it. :)
A compact beginner's Objective-C tutorial
That's OK, Google Voice would have crushed their dreams anyway.
The author of the article also won the Pulitzer for writing this brilliant piece about skill, art, and modern life:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...
Driving traffic to your site. The power of social network based traffic is that you can reach people who wouldn't have searched for your keywords. Think 'publicity instead of 'retail. </IMHO>
Internet Explorer 8 released, progress unmistakable
>the previous design was quite popular and functional.

But there was just the same outrage over that design for a good month. I probably got 10 group invites to groups like "new facebook sucks!" and "don't visit facebook on (some date) to show them how much we hate new facebook."

I'm not sure if anyone took a poll, even a biased one, but I haven't noticed among my friends any more outrage over this redesign than the last one.
Six years in the Valley
Nice catch. It's the first imaging study to show the effect, I guess. I think this is one of the reasons for its popularity. It not only makes some folks alert. It makes them happy and alert. That's the holy combination. Caffeine doesn't quite get there and how big is that market? When we look back in fifty years at the development of custom (and cosmetic) psychotropics, I bet modafinil leads the story.
Great article. I actually asked a similar question here a while back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345651).

Nice job ...

On a side note, my only complaint is your analysis of iStockPhoto's quality compared to expensive stock players. IMO, most microstock (while good enough for many people's needs) isn't on par with professionally produced stock photography and many people can see a difference. Plus, if you say that in a room of professional photogs, you're likely to get a beat down :)
Building a big Internet site and providing the service for free is great. It isn't impossible to do that and be successful. But why not have services that users pay for in addition to the free content? Surely there are some services where users who are getting what they need for free wouldn't be concerned with and likewise there are people who are willing to pay for "something more."
That's what I would think. I suppose they feel like the one two punch of socialism-prompter reader is a killer. Sigh.
When I read this article all I could think about was Raffi singing 'Banana Phone.' Now I can't get it out of my head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-LbvFPLpeo&feature=playe...
The iPhone Gets A New Weapon In The War On Drunk Dials
It's interesting because there seems to be this ethos among the hacker/tech startup community that if you want to be successful you either need to be young, a college drop out, or an ivy league grad.

The Kauffman foundation did a study on entrepreneurship though and found that this idea is totally off base. (http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&sho...)

This article is fascinating - and well worth a read. If you are looking for a quick summary: More education directly correlates with better performance in your startup, and most founders are much older and have greater work experience than people would think.
Strattera has the same concentration improving effects of stimulants and is not habit forming.
amazing; thanks; hacker news really needs to get it's own block
That's easier said than done: http://cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/malware_biz.pdf
Yes, I do enjoy programming. Sometimes, it is a means to an end for me (as in to accomplish a task, not a business), but is nonetheless fun.

Typically, I find the most enjoyment out of programming when I am working on projects I want to work on. The sheer joy of seeing your creation come to life from your own two hands is immeasurable. Even fighting (and conquering) bugs and the compiler is thrilling, despite the superficial swearing.

Programming as a means to an end is also enjoyable, given certain circumstances. For example, I still feel a rush when I crank out a memorized quadratic solver program or trapezoid rule program on a TI-83/84 for a friend or classmate in math class. Also, I get my work done much faster.

However, programming as a required task is unpleasant. In my AP Computer Science course, I am required to create derivative "Bug" classes from the GridWorld API and hand it in. It is utterly boring! I feel like a code monkey every second while programming that monstrosity. It offers no benefit for me at all. The only thing I get out of the ordeal is a stupid little number (actually letter) that goes on my transcript. By the way, I also learn all essential topics (like data structures) outside of class, so I really feel like I am not missing anything interesting or useful.

At the risk of being proved incorrect or downmodded, I will offer an analogy:

Programming is like an arts-n-crafts class when you were a child. You get to create neat-looking bracelets, necklaces, ceramics, or origami in a relatively short time, but with full excitement. Best of all, you get to keep your creation and treasure it forever. That is the true reward.

Programming is also like a pointless required class in grade school. You do relatively boring projects just to fill out the graduation requirements and the only reward you get is a small number placed in the top-right corner of your paper which might give you bragging rights, if at all.

For me, programming merely for the hell of it is fun.
The iphone was a new product, that's the difference.

The only thing comparable in the Apple world is the release of OS X. At the time there was A LOT of complaint, much of it extremely well-reasoned. Diehards clung to OS 9 for years for pure interface reasons. Of course Apple didn't take quite as big a public opinion hit as Facebook due to the technical benefits and the horrible obsolescence of OS 9.

Does Facebook need to avoid this backlash? Only if people actually stop using it, which seems unlikely.
Bash is a decent command line shell, but it sure makes a lousy attempt to be a programming language. I wouldn't mind so much except that because of this, people keep creating big ugly bash scripts and I have to keep opening them up and reading them.
I'm not talking about viewing illegal things as a crime, and I don't agree that my arguments logical conclusion is that watching anything wrong makes you responsible. I'm talking about production and use. Watching a video of taking drugs is not using drugs, it's therefore not a crime and won't encourage drug producers to produce more drugs. Watching a video of Child Porn is using the produce of an illegal activity, could very well encourage more production, and is therefore a crime.

ErrantX's job is to determine the intent of the viewer by seeing if they actively downloaded and used the produce of an illegal activity. If he does his job well, I see no problem with putting people in jail for this crime.
Chinese game company files for Nasdaq IPO
my first impression too was WTF? the entire first page tells you almost nothing. Seeing that there were 5+ pages, no thanks....
A few years ago, I saw a news article about a small Canadian study (out of Alberta, I think; maybe the University at Edmonton) that found nicotine to be as effective as prescription medications in mediating AD(H)D symptoms. I've seen other items online emphasizing its effect on concentration.

I'm having trouble googling up a reference, but I did find this:

http://www.accessibility.com.au/news/adhd-appears-to-increas...

"We've already shown that nicotine-based medications can treat ADHD symptoms"
AIG's CEO was picked by the Feds last year. He decided that these folks were the best that he could get for the job. (The existence of federal employees competent at something else doesn't imply that they're any good at unwinding AIG as profitably as possible.)

Maybe he's stupid, incompetent, and/or corrupt. But, surely you've got some actual evidence that a significantly better or at least cheaper job can be done.
I might just be cynical but i reckon that they are having problems getting people to click on their ads. The redesigns seem to be attempts to fix that problem.
MIT adopts a university-wide Open Access mandate
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/advice-on-eq...
Good luck quiting! I don't smoke, but I'm close people who have quit and or are trying to. Don't get too discouraged from not successfully quitting. From what I have seen, it seems like most people have to try several times before successfully quitting. So it's completely normal. And just you fail a few times, it doesn't mean you don't have the ability to quit.You should let us know sometime later how you are doing quitting smoking. I'd be interested.
The ironic thing that really amazes me about the whole censorship thing is that these proposals are being pushed primarily from the left wing side of our political system.

The other ironic thing is that our right wingers are called the Liberal Party.

Go figure eh?
Flip Video: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong And Then So, So Right.
Wikipedia did mention that nicotine has several psychoactive effects. It reduces stress. And amazingly enough, it can work as both a sedative and a stimulant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Psychoactive_effects
yeah like gangrene cures cancer
TomTom Countersues: Linux And Microsoft Going To War
I just installed it, and had to reinstall Chrome because it stopped working once IE8 installed. Great work Microsoft!
On the plus side, smoking is good for creating a social interaction situation - smokers meet each other and chat. And it creates some semi-forced breaks in the day, which is good.

On the down side, there are health risks (obviously). And to some non-smokers, the smell is really repulsive. (I've had people try and convince me that this is bullshit. Um. No, trust me, not everyone is physically wired the same way, to some people smokers are unpleasant to be around just after they've had a cigarette. We're not lying.) And it wastes time and a non-trivial amount of money.

Good luck if you decide to quit - it's very hard, but people manage it.
Perhaps not. But suppose I wrote 5,000 pages of pure stream of consciousness drivel. Would you feel obligated to read every page before deciding the whole thing was crap?
Oh the irony if NASA decided the lander does not need to be waterproof, because there is no water on Mars!
It took me a very long time to learn how to hack without smoking after I got used to it. For those that have never done it, there is a real measurable performance increase for smoking while programming. It comes at the cost of killing you years earlier, and making you chronically unhealthy, but it does make you hack faster.

I eventually found that when I took wellbutrin to stop smoking it had the exact same mental effect for hacking. You may want to see your doctor and give it a try.

That said, don't start smoking, ever, for any reason. It's a terrible habit that takes forever to quit, costs thousands of dollars a year, and can easily start with just one smoke.
Here's what I found interesting about quitting smoking:

For us modern Westerners, morality has evolved from an authoritarian, rule-based system to a consequentialist one based on individual judgment of specific cases. An example of the former would be Jewish law: don't eat certain foods; don't wear certain clothes; don't perform certain activities on certain days. Why? Because that's what G-d and the rabbi tell you to do. Or for Catholics: x is a mortal sin, y is a venal sin, tell the priest about it and he'll tell you how many Our Fathers to say to atone. Nowadays most of us think of this stuff as superstition, even the religious among us. We decide for ourselves what's the right thing to do, and we evaluate potential actions largely on their consequences. It's OK to lie to your friend to spare her feelings. It's OK to kill someone in self-defense, or in defense of others. It's OK to steal money to buy medicine for your dying wife. Most of us accept this way of looking at the world, with all its gray areas. Personally, I think this is progress.

When you're quitting smoking, you have to decide -- constantly, every day -- which is more important: your need for a cigarette right this instant, or the damage that will be done to you by that one cigarette. And if you keep thinking about it that way, eventually your craving will grow so powerful that you'll say fuck it and choose the cigarette.

So the only way to stay quit is to adopt a rule: I will not smoke cigarettes because I am not allowed to smoke cigarettes. It feels odd, to decide that certain questions about what you'll do are settled in advance, because we're not used to it. But it worked for me. Good luck.
I've had excellent results from using smoking as a quick test to disqualify applicants for programming positions--on the theory that anyone who smokes can't really be smart enough to be a good hire. This test might occasionally make a mistake, but it seems overwhelmingly accurate.