skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking for feedback on API
We've just launched a service that enables end users to automatically port their social graph from one site to another. We're looking for feedback on the API to see if there is something we are missing? Here's a link to the API documentation.
http://freemyfriends.com/Api/Default.aspx

We are looking for feedback from a programmer's perspective, but honestly any feedback is much appreciated.
It never worked for me unfortunately.

Me neither.

I wonder why it didn't work. They certainly have enough of a dataset to play with by now. I wonder if it's computationally too intensive to continually update each user's results, or too difficult to come up with a good algorithm.

Does this "recommended page" problem bear any resemblance to the Netflix prize problem?

Creating a good recommended page would certainly lure me back to reddit.
Scientists make single-photon sources brighter
I think it's pretty cool, I am just getting into building some facebook apps and you just need some reflection and some mouseclick dragging going on and you got the full coverflow thing going on.

How long did it take you to create this, if you don't mind me asking?
Google cameras may help catch a killer
OTOH, with the speed of our court system, he probably could've made a nice little income on the interest.
This related tech is also very cool:
http://www.think-a-move.com/

Voice based control, tongue based control, and eventually thought based control.
Based on what he writes in the article, it doesn't look like he has done any investigation of his own.

Viz. "To my knowledge, no sports team in the history of humankind has ever run a random control trial to figure out which strategies work the best. (I make this extravagant claim in hopes of provoking you all into providing some counterexamples.)"
You are telling me that I have to learn to code in Javascript? Are you serious? I've been avoiding Javascript for years. Abstractions such as libraries make this possible. This seems like a step backward.

What I saw "Make Simple Web Apps A Breeze," I expected Infogami done correctly. Drag and drop some buttons to make a website, publish it to an account, and voila, I have a website.

Don't get me wrong, the premise is very cool. It gets my computer science geekery excited. But this is a business here, and it seems like a tool built for geeks by geeks. I don't know what the business model, but based on every other venture YC has backed, it depends on the typical Web 2.0 paradigm: get users --> get funding --> ultimately get ad-based revenue or other branch out to other forms. If your only target is geeks, then good luck. Otherwise, I suggest a little more ease-of-use.

From the few examples I quickly browsed, nothing is out of the ordinary; a chat program, a wiki, a "notes" page, etc... All common Web paradigms that can be abstracted.

Again, very cool, and I look forward to playing around with it once my semester ends. But at the moment, I don't think anybody but the hardcore techies will enjoy it.
I don't think so. The site has grown past a critical point and caused the quality of submissions to submarine below anything the "old" crowd has any interest in. To paraphrase a comment I saw on reddit: it has degraded to the lowest common denominator -- politics.
Worked for me too, without the need to register/login.
odd how not many people here care to comment.
I remember seeing this video in a very sobering HBO documentary: http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/hackingdemocracy/
I've been to the site a few times, and I don't understand what Penthouse sees in it. All of the "personals" on the main page are clearly fake, only there to sucker people in to join the site. I suppose it could make money, but I doubt it actually does what you expect it to do -- get you laid.
The Digital Studio
There's not much to say. It's sobering to think that it is somewhat likely that the voting machines were rigged and that there is absolutely no way of confirming it.
So your point is that the old crowd is now nowhere to be seen in the site?

I also found the approach to solving this problem by the Jaanix website fascinating (http://jaanix.com/).
I can't believe you took the time to write that.
I just don't know. Don't we need a few major social news sites as well as the smaller ones?
IPOs: "The Competitive Position of the U.S. Public Equity Market" (2007) [PDF]
The report issued by the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation highlights a disturbing trend: 5% of the value of global initial public offerings was raised in the U.S. last year, compared to 50% in 2000.

The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation is an independent and bipartisan group comprised of 24 leaders from the investor community, business, finance, law, accounting, and academia. On November 30, 2006, the Committee issued its interim report, highlighting areas of concern about the competitiveness of U.S. capital markets and outlining 32 recommendations in four key areas to enhance that competitiveness. A final report (the PDF link above) was issued on December 4, 2007.
You can use a for loop, if you step through the array with pointer arithmetic. On the assumption that you're given the array length (or else that the array is of fixed size), you don't need to hand-unroll the loop, which wouldn't handle a variably-sized array anyway.

But I agree that it's a bad interview question.
I emailed Daniel about this. One feature I'd really like to see is a way to "reuse" the user accounts I have on my own site. I don't want to tell users, oh if you want to comment you have to sign up for a new account over here..

I haven't given it enough thought to know if that is possible though :-(
No Deal: First experience from the investing side :(
I had to turn down funding for a promising startup that I really liked and believed in this afternoon for reasons wholly unrelated to the venture or any decision I had made.

It really, really sucked.

To not even get a chance because A didn't get to B in X time... that's just lame. Lame isn't respectable, interesting, or memorable. It's not even failure.

Failure is privilege. I hope everyone out there keeps working hard and keeps hopeful even though A and B couldn't quite get to X this time.
"Is there any reason to code the pages by hand anymore for a frequently updated site?"

There hasn't been a reason to hand code anything that is at all dynamic or frequently updated for a decade. There's a reason PHP is so popular after all.

That being said, any HTML/CSS that has to do with layout is still best done by hand.

On the spectrum of tools available, what most people are looking for is a hand-coded layout/template with something like wordpress/moveable type generating the content.
Google Updates Toolbar, Offers iPhone Version of Picasa
Think outside the box. Then live inside the box.
Why can't we all live inside the container. I really doubt we all need 5000 square foot homes unless the 4000 are woods and gardens....
The other tech CEOs "For every Chad Hurley or Mark Zuckerberg there are many Sathvik Krishnamurthys"
Just got an email from President Graham about a ycombinator funded start-up using a super precise atomic clock and a little Javascript 42.0 to build a Web 14.0 time machine.

pg, when you send me that email on 02/14/2028, kindly attach the winning Powerball numbers for 12/12/2007. Thanx.
You are not the type I am speaking of then because to you comprehension and insight are important, and good grades are an artifact of that.
Actually - what you want to do is bluff randomly with very carefully calculated probabilities.

The problem is - humans are not good at generating random bits on command.
Morale: Germanness makes intelligent. ;)
Because there are - nearly always - energetically cheaper ways to get your matter than making it out of energy.

I mean - we sit on a huge pile of matter called the earth.
LeWeb3 Conference Report
Right, but in his essay, all he says is something like, "I look down at my watch, and if the second hand is between 0 and 6, I bluff." To me, that's totally random, and that's not the right way to go about bluffing.
Winning on the election slogan "why vote for the lesser of two languages?"
"NIST's Time and Frequency Division hardly invites a sense of precision."

The description that follows could be used for any truly productive environment I've known. Why does a publication like wired need to perpetuate a stereotype of scientists in white lab coats without a spec of dust anywhere?
Sure, I was just saying that the lowest-common-denominator problem will mainly affect bigger sites, and more nichey stuff will be better served by topic-specific sites.
Personally, I don't really care where the comments show up on Google searches.

What I do care about is the fact that it took about 30 seconds to sign up and add the Javascript snippet to my site's footer template. It couldn't have been easier.

Removing as many hurdles as possible is key.
The mere fact that the source for these machines is not available for public scrutiny is a pretty clear indication that voting machines threaten the democratic process.

I wonder if anyone has tried to use FOI laws to gain access to the code, and if so, how much of it was redacted?
That would be a better strategy if they advertised it well. It would give users a strong incentive to vote on articles.
I love how close this is to what we (Ning) started with, down to the cloning terminology! Really interested to see where it goes. The other "JS Everywhere" folk-programming startup (name escapes me) went tits up recently :-( Not sure why.

Good luck!
Army Sets Up New Office of Videogames
Doing p++, len-- uses two temporary variables.
How do think appjet is better than CogHead, I'm curious?
what about if you guys get together with the weebly guys and make an easy to use code-if-you-want drag-and-drop-if-you-don't web application maker (or back to viaweb but meta)?
Google tries search design AOL discarded
If you believe in it, can't you refer it to someone else that does not have the same deal-breaking constraints as you do?
Having the source code wouldn't be much of an assurance. How do you know that this code is really the code that is deployed on the machine during the elections? How do you know that the memory cards that store the votes are not tampered with? How do you know that the machine's hardware works "as advertized"?

Without a paper trail, we should assume every voting mechanism is rigged. The stakes are just too high to do otherwise.
Problem is Google penalizes pages with duplicate content by lowering their PageRank. If comments are duplicated on your blog as well as on discus.com, your blog could pay a price.
I don't think the founders have much of an incentive to change reddit a whole lot. Also, the existing algorithm is definitely computationally intensive: it takes 12 seconds to generate a new recommended page.
Baysian filters requires quite a lot of training to start working effectively. People don't want to rate hundreds of articles before they start getting good content.
There was actually a short interview with him on IT Conversations a few years ago. Kind of fascinating:

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail310.html
Dead Tree Media Watch: BusinessWeek Lays Off 12
eBay Takes a $30 Million Hit Over Buy It Now Patent
Adobe Releases BlazeDS, Open Source Version of LiveCycle Data Services
Why is Yahoo Answers popular?  Is it mostly about students getting homework help from each other?
Chapter titles alone make an excellent and readable Top 20 list.
I couldn't disagree more.

"What's the cube root of 9? What is the minimum number of points needed to determine a plane? What happens in your app if you divide by zero?"

All those questions only show that you can memorize answers.

"On the other hand, what motif did Browning employ in the last stanza? Is man basically good or evil? Which economic theory works best in the third world?"

These questions show that you have an ability to think. Most of the time when you're doing real development there are little black and white questions. Most of the time it's a matter of trade-offs and using your judgement, experience and intuition to choose a solution.

The point of grades is not to judge how many "correct" answers you have memorized. The point is to reflect the instructors opinion of a) your intelligence, b) the amount of effort you have displayed and c) how much you have learned.

And you can judge how much you have learned not just by having the right answer to every question, but by having solid reasoning behind your answer.
I really do not have any interest in this subject. That being said, I loved the passion and earnestness with which the documentation and information was presented. Looks like you have a very good product in the works.
Its time for facebook scrapers - distributed, with human-ish delays between click. Grabs names, pictures, emails (with OCR). Welcome to the downloadable social!
Pornotube is sure to go for a billy now.
Honestly, this doesn't sound too bad for a worst case scenario story. This story probably holds true for any 5+ year old Valley company that has managed to survive.
Don't forget to check out his site http://conru.com/
Even if this guy had a point to make, he sure as hell did not make it with that example. That example seems to indicate that Jason's site isn't even indexed by Google, so of course it doesn't show up.
P.S. Works today (one day later). Well done.
Where Scheme came from [pdf]
I would assume this is partly because many of us have been upset with electronic voting machines since day one. Machines without paper trails are scary, and there's not much more for the hackers here to say.

What's odd is that, seemingly, so few non-hackers are scared of the implications of these machines.

Here's a scary combo: Ron Paul's tech savvy followers + no paper trails.
Finance app Buxfer gets some iPhone love
We've just released an iPhone interface for Buxfer. Check it out, and let us know what's good, what's bad, and what's missing...

Thanks!
It scares me a lot less than existing system. Ron Paul and the Ron Paul followers are strongly in favor of a paper trail, by the way: without it, they fear being disenfranchised.
"Somewhat" likely?

Here's how normal paper ballots work: After the polls officially close, they count them up, in full view of whatever members of the public care to observe. In hotly-contested areas, this will usually include members of both/all the major political parties. This mutual distrust keeps everyone honest. Fraud is obviously not impossible, but is more difficult to get away with.

Here's how electronic voting works: A private, for-profit corporation TELLS you what the numbers are, with no paper trail and using unauditable practices protected by "trade secret" (court ruling).

What else do you need to know? People will scam other people for a buck, let alone control of the entire country. The burden of proof should be on the voting process to show that it's correct, not on those who challenge it; because the very lack of auditability is a virtual guarantor of fraud. It is not an accident when ATM companies produce voting machines with no receipts.

In the 2004 election, exit polls tracked closely with the official counts in the paper ballot areas, but were way off the "official" totals in the electronic voting areas. E.g. http://www.nogw.com/images/exit_poll.jpg

Hackers make ZERO difference. Hack all the votes you want going in; the voting machine company is a black box, and it will produce whatever totals it wants as output.

It's ESPECIALLY not going to announce if it were breached and is now completely untrustworthy; it's going to produce numbers that look plausible to save its own ass, leaving aside any nefarious reasons. Even if all their voting data was corrupted, they could just get the exit poll or pre-election survey numbers and tweak by a few percent in the desired direction in a few key areas and voila.

How many people need to be in on this? One guy with root access.
Realistically, there isn't going to be a paper trail in November, or in the foreseeable future for that matter.

At the risk of getting "too" political, I believe there's a contingent of Paul supporters who don't seem so... umm... ethically inclined. A goofy thing to say about the world of politics, no doubt. But combine that lack of ethics with technological ability...
Alright, I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the 2000 and 2004 elections were rigged, but I didn't want to sound like a crackpot. It's too bad there is no political process left in America.
New KITT is a Ford Mustang.  Guess Ford was the highest bidder.
I don't understand complaints about a shortage of developers. In a free market economy there is no such thing as a shortage, by definition. There may be occasional, temporary imbalances between supply and demand. But over several years the market will equalize at the natural clearing price. If there was really a shortage then labor prices would increase sharply, and that would cause more smart people to get educated and enter the market.

Of course, when most industry executives complain about a programmer shortage what they really mean is they are having trouble finding smart, experienced people who will work long hours on boring projects for low pay. Imagine that.
Ahem, surely you're not suggesting that people violate copyright by posting copies of complete articles here?
The geezers who typically volunteer during elections probably don't mind manually counting up ballots.
You don't need a temporary variable for "p" -- if the task is to write a function, you must have a pointer with the address of the start of the array, not an array variable as such. And yeah, you need some way to tell the length.
Facebook Responds to OpenSocial: Opening up Facebook Platform Architecture To Other Sites
First new Venture Voice in Months -- Show #47 - Tom Perkins of Kleiner Perkins [podcast]
But who says it's a crackpot theory? Mainstream media, owned by...

I think more generally this is exposing the problem with majority rule, whose time should come to an end anyway. What if there IS a legitimate >50% Idiocracy? Just look at the birth rate among different political groups and you can see which way we're heading.

I didn't consent to be ruled by anyone, let alone the people "in charge" now. I didn't agree to all these rules, or all these laws, that claim to govern every aspect of my existence.

The next step in human liberation is freedom from those who seek to control others. Given the scarcity of natural resources, but effectively infinite virtual resources, you can do whatever you want in your own virtual reality. It will be freedom for your mind.
But they aren't duplicated, since the comments show up in a JavaScript generated iframe (although I admit that's not ideal)

The Googlebot doesn't execute JavaScript, or count iframe'd pages as part of the original page.
Was Digg ever good?

Not to mention, unlike Reddit, they weren't neutral. They would try to squelch certain stories and ban users. They shut down all submissions after their attempted squelching of the HD-DVD hex key didn't work. They banned unpopular viewpoints. Censorship was de rigueur.
...and where you are in the array, hence the temp variable.

Write it out to see.

So it still doesn't work, even if you use a function to "cheat" and get a "free" pointer (which, by the way, wasn't what the task said).
"Windows 7 Touch Features To Blow Us Away"
And the intern working for peanuts if anything is a better deal for him/her? I'd say the risks incurred by both sides are equal and that is to say, they are very little.
How much genetic difference is enough? It is obvious that there is a grouping of features beyond skin color. Where you put the line between races is somewhat arbitrary - and this is the same with all concepts, so it doesn't make sense to think about genetic difference (e.g. in Rwanda Hutu and Tutsi are considered different races, even though genetic difference is almost inexistent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Tutsi_and_Hutu). People have established this concepts because they are/were useful, and will continue to use them.
Quagmire - "Programs are drawings"
If both Disqus and your site used OpenID you would get that for free :)

Unfortunately it appears that neither does :(

Anyone developing a new website should take the little extra time to support OpenID authentication, it would make the world a better place.

However, one nice thing about Disqus (like OpenID) is that you only have to register with Disqus once, and any blog using Disqus can use that one account.
I have no idea what "A didn't get to B in X time" means. Can you elaborate?
The point is the comments aren't indexed as part of your site because they are displayed in an iframe from Disqus's servers. They show up as belonging to Disqus, not you.
Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wii Remote
Sexprs in Leopard
Coding Horror: Are You a Doer or a Talker?
My understanding was that what has been tested (and ruled on) in court is whether the code comprises a trade secret, and whether as a trade secret the code should be disclosed.

I still don't get what's wrong with the mkI pencil and ballot paper!
absolutely amazing. hopefully this will get commercialized very soon.
The idea of companies getting free labor isn't neccessarily true, at least not for more meaningful jobs where the lead in time from hiring to productivity is longer (hence the desire for low turnover).

However, I believe what this article is suggesting that if the system were to change so internships as "free trial[s]" were the norm companies would likely have better hires in the long term.

Since markets with more liquidity adjust more rapidly, allowing people to move around more and allowing companies to better hire for culture fit (which may be hard to determine in a series of interviews) would ultimately result in a happier (and more efficient) labor market. Interesting idea.