skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I attended AngelConf too and it was very instructive. Both for entrepreneurs and for budding angels.

The only thing missing was some kind of template, or recipe for becoming an angel. We heard from 10+ amazing current angels, so you can sort of figure out what the rules and best practices are.

But it didn't tell you: if you want to become an angel today, do X (or join X). That's the question I was hoping to answer at AngelConf.
This brings to mind an old saying:

You can't polish a turd

The underlying assumption to the post is that somewhere deep within the turd being polished there is a nugget of gold.

Not every turd is hiding a nugget of gold. And not every polisher of turds has the capacity or understanding to find the nugget.

The other saying that comes to mind is:

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the
ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.
This has been known for a while now: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php/db_area/imag...

The hardware is nothing to get excited over, but if they can sell really cheaply they might have a shot. This looks like a product for the urban middle class if anything. Consoles aren't exactly powerhouses in most emerging markets because of the dominance of piracy and PCs.
I'm not familiar with the original, and so I have no idea what this game is about or how it works. The screenshots and the description don't help at all either. Instead, they make it look like some sort of budgeting app.

Suggestion - Make me want to play it. Include a small description of the gameplay and have the screenshots reflect this. At the moment I'd give it a quick look and a wtf!? and then move on.
ASP.NET Development Server works slow in Firefox, way faster in IE
I'm working over ASP.NET MVC these days and I've noticed that the ASP.NET Development Server that comes along Visual Web Developer 2008 Express works too slow for Firefox. Access the web app in IE (7 in my case) and you see a huge difference in speed.
Has anyone else too observed same behavior? Is this some sort of anti-firefox campaign... to make developers feel IE is better than firefox?
I've never heard of "manualated" before. I've always called it "flinstoning" :)
Though the catch is that gold itself does not have any purchasing power in the real world. You have to trade it for real currency before you'll be able to pay for other goods and services.

Additionally it doesn't actually provide you with a fixed income, like you can with cash in an interest bearing account, or with shares in companies that pay a dividend.

Suffice to say now would be an excellent time to turn gold into cash given the high current gold price. Just do it through a reputable dealer.
Ok, cool. I assumed it was the case.
In "Critical Mass" by Philip Ball chapter 7 covers "The inexorable dynamics of traffic" which is highly worth a read if this subject matter interests you. There's also some very interesting sections on crowd dynamics and route finding.
This is totally summed up by the conclusion: "I am sure many will object to my verbage in this article. Some may find it offensive. It should be. It was intended to shock."
Three20: Open Source iPhone UI Goodness
I don't know the game you're trying to remake, so I would like some info on how to play it (in the app). So far I bought some shopping bags, but I can't see how that helps me (I might be stupid though).

Otherwise nice interface, I like the travel screen :) Unfortunately I don't know what I gain from travelling.
Welcome to Lisbon Portugal
Lisbon, Portugal is one of those cities that make for a perfect venue to reminisce about history and past cultures. The City of Lisbon is a rainbow of historic architectural styles, from Baroque cathedrals such as the Estrela Basilica to the Gothic style of the Elevador de Santa Justa and the Sao Roque Church in the Manueline style.
XSLT Abuse
disable ipv6 in firefox and it will be fine
network.dns.disableIPv6
but a simpler way to add this information is to title the list. "Tags by popularity". You don't have to go to the trouble of inventing a whole other representation. I'd contend that adding a little bit of information to the title is much better than going to a tag cloud. The visual cue from the tag cloud (that the bigger things are more important) is inherent in the ordered list too (the things at the top are more important).

> sometimes they're not ordered at all, which is visually identical to an ordered list.
An ordered list is always ordered, the only question is whether ascending or descending. And a tag cloud where the terms are randomly sized is visually identical to a tag cloud where the size means popularity...

I think the benefit of tag clouds is purely aesthetic. They just look prettier in certain places, and even that point is debatable.
The underlying assumption to the post is that somewhere deep within the turd being polished there is a nugget of gold.

It's not that so much as that in the process of polishing the turd, it's possible for you to realize you're working on a turd and start over again. That's part of the revision process.

One case that stands out to me was that in the writing of my novel, I had a 70-page part that I thought was great and slaved away on, then realized in one blinding moment that it was awful. I threw it away, rewrote the entire section over a day, and now it's the best part of the book. (I'll say in advance that the book wasn't exactly a nugget of gold, but at least I was aware of that when I published it. If I'd spent more time in it it could have become much better.)
How well will hospitals adapt to their new $100 million IT systems?
If you're using an API all the time, it's easy to justify investing the time in understanding it to the next level.

API defines an abstraction - I assume you're askng about understanding that abstraction completely, not the specifics of how it is implemented. An abstraction can include changes of (abstract) state, and it can include performance characteristics/gotchas (as in Joel's "Leaky Abstractions").

An API can be designed for learning, by forming a series of nested abstractions, such that you can completely understand each well-defined subset independent of understanding all the other subsets. Perhaps an example is a String object in Java or Python. Understanding creation and assignment is a completely self-contained subset of its functionality, without using any of its methods (as such). A deeper level of understanding includes performance characteristics.

To answer the question: I feel I must understand the subset of the abstraction that I am using, in order be confident in the correctness of my code.

But many APIs are not designed this way. Designing APIs for usability is hard, and most programmers prioritize features, performance and internal elegance over it. I suffered to write this. Now it's your turn.

And, worse, the implementations of many APIs have bugs (well, all of them do). It's just that more users find more bugs, so more popular libraries usually have fewer bugs (in their mature parts).

I find a constant pressure between writing the best possible code - and getting things done (one advantage of getting something done is it puts you at a vantage point where you can see more - and becoming part of the process of understanding).
It does not work for me personally. I don't like the way that the options appear in places that I did not predict they would appear in. When I interact with anything, I want it to behave exactly the way I expect it to behave, and to do so consistently.

The songza site does not behave as I expect it to, and even after I learn how it works, it does not behave consistently in its own mould. I click an item and up pops some 4 arrow thing. When I move over some arrows, yet more things pop up and on some other arrows, more things don't pop up, and there is no hint as to which will cause things to pop up or not. So even though one might learn how such a navigation works on that particular site, as soon as you go to another site, you will have to relearn again which of those arrows will cause popups and which will not. Contrast that to a right click menu which always indicates which options will pop out.

I don't think circles are good navigation tools, for the reason that there are very few popular tools which use circles as their main navigation mode.
I played the original game through many classes in middle school. As long as you don't have big dreams, maybe play it as an updated version of the old game. If the old game got 1000s of kids to play when the only way to transfer games was cables, you should be able to get some good traction.
All you iPhone developers out there, take note... you could probably sell a lot more copies on this thing (assuming a successful launch).
For anyone interested, the BBC produced an excellent series "The Seven Wonders of the Industrial World", one episode of which covers the Brooklyn Bridge.

It's available as a set of DVDs, but the book is also well worth getting. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seven-Wonders-Industrial-World-DVD/d...
I think the point was that it wasn't an NHibernate problem, it was a SQL Server problem. The first link when you google that error message gives a good troubleshooting process, and the guy gave no indication that he had searched first. But it agree that it was an over the top response.
Or split your workload up so it can be run on 200 cores in an instant. Not to advertise, but I'm not affiliated with Nvidia - http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/tesla_deskside.html
Last weekend I was at a hotel and saw a small seminar with a bunch of mostly older people. The sign read GOLD4CASH. Is this the other side of Cash4Gold's business?

I have actually heard some dubious ads on the radio about buying gold recently ("we'll send you your first shipment of real gold in 2-3 weeks after signing up", etc.).
> Jungledisk is down

did I miss something?
"In the same way I fancied that those nations which, starting from a semi-barbarous state and advancing to
civilization by slow degrees, have had their laws successively determined, and, as it were, forced upon them
simply by experience of the hurtfulness of particular crimes and disputes, would by this process come to be
possessed of less perfect institutions"

- Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

I think that Descartes' thrust here is that building anything up slowly will introduce artifacts that have nothing to do with the optimal solution.

Sometimes the only way to truly succeed is to come up with a truly amazing starting point. If you try to build off a bad idea, you will often get nowhere.

From the article: "It baffles me that people think making...worldshocking pieces of work is a particular challenge. It’s mainly a battle of endurance."

I don't disagree with you here, but I think you are vastly underestimating the backbreaking effort in that single word: endurance. Try telling a marathoner that just hit the wall at mile 22 that all they need is a little more endurance.

"Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

- Thomas Edison
I think it was Linus Torvalds who said 'Documentation is like sex. When it's good, it's really, really good and when it's bad it's better than nothing.'

But apart from stuff like javadocs (which usually is just type information and fairly relaiable but generally uninformative) any coder with a few years under their belt will just see documentation as signposts. Stuff that might, just might, get you part of the way there.

Let's take Microsoft as an example. Everyone is always going on about how stellar their documentation is. And they're right. MS does documentation for established products really well. But if you happen to be interested in, say, the limits of the jscript library ... well, you're out of luck. It becomes a hole and you have to resort to black box techniques or reverse engineering to figure out what those limits are.

Also, software documentation has its own scale. Where do you put all the documentation you're supposed to be writing about your codebase? Some of that is easy ('document a method') but as you move up the abstraction scale you end up with tutorials, which obviously have no place in source code. Where do you draw the line and how do you manage to keep the documentation outside of the source in sync with the source? And while we're on it, changes in source will have to be kept in sync with documentation about it that exists somewhere in the codebase.

(All of this is no excuse for not actually having good documentation, btw).
The title is a bit confusing... perhaps it should read:
"Are you happy with incomplete understanding of API, provided that your app seems to work?"

For me, the answer is "not always". When the topic is security or performance, I definitely prefer to have as much knowledge of the API as possible.

I remember reading an interesting article about Java's File and how the internal implementation used null terminated strings (which ultimately meant that you could bypass a string-based check (such as 'filename.endsWith(".jpg")' and have the subsequent new File(filename) call open a different file than you'd expect.

On a different story, I was able to speed-up a web-app speed significantly because I knew (from reading the js library's source code) that the DOM querying functions we were using so extensively were very inefficient.

With those anedoctes out of the way, I'll say that knowing how every single function in every single API ticks is probably overkill. I usually only dig deeper when

a) I have to because something needs to be fixed
b) It's a very specific area of expertise that happens to interest me
I haven't played this game, but it just looks like a variant of drug wars. Drug Wars pretty much about trading stock (drugs) in the market. You travel around New York and buy and sell different drugs. Sometimes you get busted, and the prices of drugs wildly fluctuate. It's been around for awhile. I first saw it in high school on a TI 83.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugwars

So it just looks like they replaced drugs with energy efficient objects like recycled paper and hybrid cars.

I'd recommend that you replace the free version with a trial version. Unless this is a beta version and you are expecting users to test your product.

And I agree that the game could have a better description of the gameplay.
Tips on designing layouts for games and virtual worlds
As if the 'real' Nobel prices are sacrosanct..
It's a script that comes with most distros, but, not with Leopard by default at least. You probably could add it, but, it's a simple command either way and not everyone can add scripts like that.
Podcasts for Geeks interested in Everything
My plugin lets you split test at the action level so that you can create separate actions with separate variables, filters, etc: http://github.com/flyingmachine/rails_ab_split_tester/tree/m...

I only made it so that it would work with Google Analytics but it wouldn't be that difficult to modify it to work with whatever you want.
In this economy, yes. I wouldn't think twice about it.
Actually, you can polish a turd:
http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-polishing-a-turd...

Just saying.
Are you familiar with the similiar apps on Facebook (Mob Wars, Mafia Wars, etc)? I'd love to draw a lesson from them, but if you're not too familiar with it, my advice might not be helpful.
AppScale: an open-source version of Google AppEngine
I've heard good things about David, so he's definitely done a good job of branding himself as a solid angel.
Django 1.1 beta released
The interesting details are in the release notes: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.1-beta-1/
It's pretty hard to find info about this online, especially since everydns.com isn't resolving either.

Engine Yard made mention of it: http://engineyard.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/everydns-unavaila...
Interesting. I had never thought about the implicit assumptions behind the term "water wars". I figured that just because I couldn't think of a significant example off the top of my head, I wasn't thinking hard enough.

I am confused by their figures, though. "If they were to be self-sufficient in food, they would need ten billion cubic metres of water per year. As it is, they have only about one-third of that: enough to grow 15-20% of their food." Ten billion would grow 100%, but a third of the water grows no more than a fifth of the food? It shouldn't be that some of the current water supply goes to other uses; a couple of sentences later is a note that domestic and industrial uses should find rainfall alone to be enough.

How would tripling the amount of water available allow them to increase domestic food production by five or six times?
Looks like they're back up.
Commercially, honeybees are essential. There are no other insects which can be so easily harnessed for huge-scale pollination. Without bees, crops would still be pollinated by other insects, but not nearly in the amount needed to sustain current levels of production (and therefore human life).
No. For the most part, it isn't scarce yet.

But, if there was to be a water war, Lake Baikal in Russia would be near the top of my list of "bodies of water to fight over." It's the largest freshwater lake, near(ish) to the Russian border, and with ~24,000 cubic kilometers of water, it has 20% of the world's surface freshwater that's drinkable.
"performing" in what sense?

If someone joins a group, for example, I'm much less likely to see that, whereas before I might've looked at the group based on the title. If someone adds a friend who I know, I probably won't notice now, whereas before I might've seen it and added that friend. These kinds of things are valuable for social networking.

What kind of performance are you measuring, and why does it matter more than other kinds?
True, but if they were getting anything like that level of activity, their plastic detector would have been swamped. If one in a hundred million neutrons produced by this process headed through the plastic, they could have reported thousands of "triple tracks", rather than a "small number". I realize that the experiment is a small step and not intended to generate energy by itself, but it strikes me as an awfully high magnitude to be counting individually with a microscope.
How could Nobel set a prize for every field that depends on mathematics but not mathematics itself?
I think the major draw of Dope Wars (at least for me in high school) was a combination of two things: the general scarcity (and low quality) of calculator games, and the need to appear studious in class. As neither of these conditions is present for iPhones, I'm not sure how much success this will have.
Exactly... I have been mining the ""mundane"" areas for ideas, since I know everyone else is riding the two point oh thing.

It's hard to force out-the-boxedness, though.
>> How would tripling the amount of water available allow them to increase domestic food production by five or six times?

I believe they can reuse water in irrigation systems.

I'm not particularly shocked that "water wars" aren't common: no one really wants to be the nation that thrives by denying their neighbours basic resources for human survival.
Interesting. Their homepage is here:http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/ -- Apparently they are supported by grants from Google and the NSF.
We have buses, which do help a good deal.
There's some pretty hard proof of Pons-esque cold fusion in recent years; for example, some tests a while back showed that deuterium in palladium could produce a large number of isotopes of heavy metals, each multiples of 4 greater in atomic mass than palladium, suggesting fusion into helium to produce alpha particles, which then were absorbed by the palladium nuclei. I think it's a pretty sure bet here that fusion is going on somewhere in some fashion.

Now, what is not obvious is whether one could actually get any sort of useful energy out of this. We already have tabletop neutron generators that classify as a form of "cold fusion"--they just take a lot more energy in than they put out and there's no practical way to make them more efficient, as opposed to magnetic confinement fusion which does show promise for scaling up.

Of course, it all needs more research, which is why the way the topic has been poisoned by Pons/Fleischmann is really a problem.
Salesforce.com Integrates Twitter
Report: Apple and AT&T to partner on U-Verse, $99 Netbook
Wow! Brilliant -- this could be huge.

This would essentially allow you to create one-click installable apps that could run on any service running AppScale.
From the home page: "AppScale is supported by Google and the National Science Foundation". Google? Wow.
I was speaking as a Facebook application developer responding to the comment about "applications can no longer be viral". I have no idea whether it's working out for Facebook as a whole, but for our own purposes it's looking very good across a whole range of metrics, mostly growth (user acquisition and activation).

As a data point, these guys: http://apps.facebook.com/livingsocial managed to get around 2 million uniques over the past couple of days, mostly from Feed virality. Again I have no idea if it's good for Facebook as a whole (and the only people who can say for sure are people with access to that data at Facebook), but for application developers it's been great.
Non-material things like status or reputation can be still scarce even with limitless energy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity#Unavoidable_scarc...
Well, I read your link and that one, in turn, doesn't convince me.

The hangup seems to be incremental search and similar operations that trigger multiple requests in the background (although I can't think of another common one from the top of my head). If that appears as a hard problem then I can only assume the author is looking at it at the wrong level of abstraction. In fact he is - he's judging it by what selenium can do.

If you take a step back from selenium for a moment and instead consider presenting the user with a meaningful visualization of all requests that happened during his sample-session, then this and similar problems suddenly become more of a challenge in UI design than anything else.

A few basic control-primitives in the UI to re-arrange the recorded script would go a long way here. Primitives such as "Clone-this-request", "Clone-with-parameter-X-from-dict", "Simulate-Incremental-Search-By-Making-n-Substr-Clones" etc. - you get the idea.

This whole "edit my script"-step seems to be missing from browsermob, just like it is missing in most similar offerings.

Hence I have to ask: How would I go about modifying my recorded selenium script to login with random users? To enter random data into forms? To actually perform random incremental searches (to evade caching)? To enter randomly chosen data into forms (e.g. to post a message to a random but existing other user)? To repeat requests first with random, then with chosen data (to hit form validation)? To react on special AJAX poll results or even server push via comet? To have multiple concurrent sessions interact with each other?

These are the common challenges that I have faced during the construction of load-tests and in my expirience that is the time-consuming part. It seems with browsermob I'm down to editing selenium scripts by hand again?

Sorry if I come across as disrespectful but the lack of usable, on-demand load-testing solutions [that don't make you pay through the nose] has indeed nagged me for a while, too.

If there's one thing that I've learned during the implementation of such tests then it would be that bad testing is worse than no testing. Nothing easier than giving yourself a false sense of security.

The incremental search example you cited is actually a textbook example for how relying on purely recorded sessions will lead to a bad test. Playing back the same recorded search a zillion times is nowhere near a realistic workload, no matter how much you crank up the concurrency.
Designing Aero Snap