skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>And if I picked a Linux distro from 8 years ago I'd find some bugs in it too. Use the current version of Windows, it has fewer bugs.

Perhaps that last bit should read "Use the current version of Windows, it has fewer known bugs."

As software gets larger and more complex the tendency is for more bugs to be introduced. Open Source mitigates this problem by allowing everyone to inspect and fix it.
The INews headline is inaccurate. They matched the street.
Nothing about this is YC-style.
My favorite term in the article: 'code narcissism'.

This debilitating disorder affects 1000s of programmers worldwide.
I'm utterly lost when it comes to all the categories of coder, engineer, programmer etc. I tend to think of "people who write code" as all being in the same bucket. How well you do that just makes you a better or worse "person who writes code" rather than putting you into different categories.
On the upside they also include the agreements online for review:
http://founderinstitute.com/information/agreements
Ugh... How is it that my future pension of $0 per month is less troubling to US government than pensions of ex-workers of a troubled auto maker?

Seriously, pensions? They expect pensions... What are they, from Mars or something? Who else gets pensions in this country?
that's an anecdote, not a counterexample.
I experimented a little with this a while back but I didn't get very far. My first assumption was to rely on keywords in the article, and match them with articles from other sources, but I wasn't able to find a good solution to finding those. My suggestion would be to go that route however.
ahh no AIX on the cloud??

got my hopes or fears up
North America for now, working on expanding asap.
For substance, a little more than in this article, check the Wikipedia page on Environmental Psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_psychology#Densit...
Skin Deep Usability (Microsoft Surface)
This is an interesting story that is all too common in the games industry. It does seem as though perseverance and 'blind' passion are the most important characteristics of game developers.

I wonder if other roles on game development teams, aside from programming, are nearly as rigorous. Obviously, they are all worked to death, but there seems to be something about furiously debugging for a prolonged crunch mode that sucks the life out of programmers.

During college, I was fortunate enough to take a class from gaming legend Warren Spector (of Deus Ex/Thief/System Shock/Ultimate fame). What impressed me most about him was his sheer, infinite passionate for the games industry. He knew gaming so intimately that I would go so far as to call him a genius. At 50+ years old, he is still going strong in the games industry.

This class brought several guest speakers that were HUGE names in the industry, notably Richard Garriot (Ultima/Tabula Rasa) and Michael Morhaime (Blizzard co-founder). These two guys entered the industry as programmers, but quickly moved onto higher roles in their respective organizations. I think that playing the position of a non-coder is crucial in their career success. There is simply no other industry that can foster the immense inventiveness and creativity required to produce successful games.
I can understand this guy's frustration, but he could have better spent his effort commenting the rest of the file properly.

Out of 500 lines, about 30 lines are spent on the rant, and there are almost no comments of any significance anywhere else, not even a file header to explain what the class is and how it should be used.
No, customer service is part of marketing.
Added title rename to my GM script:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
I'm sure mainframes by the hour are in the pipeline.
The video game industry is great in my opinion, but then again, I work at a startup instead of at a monolithic corporation with over a thousand other employees.

Probably anyone working at a company that large would get burnt out, regardless of industry.
news.yc or YCombinator news just don't roll off the tongue as easily as Hacker New or even Innocuous News :)
Now you can rename HN whatever you want
If you are willing to use a GM script anyway...

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Seems like a harmless change to me!
remember, a relation is a function

That's backwards. In a Venn diagram relations are the big circle and functions are the smaller circle inside it. A function is a deterministic relation.

If you mean to say a table is a function, then yes. All relations, including functions, can be represented using a table.

If a row is listed more than once (e.g. the row 3 9) it still doesn't affect the definition of my function. 3 still maps to 9.

This is the issue really. I think what you're saying is:

{1,2,3,3} == {1,2,3}

That's true mathematically, but that's not what's happening in SQL. Try creating the table to represent the square function. Now try inserting (3,9) into it twice. SQL won't let you because it forces tables to represent relations. Not queries though.

In my example {1,2,3} is the direct representation of the value of the set and {1,2,3,3} is a different representation. The tables and queries in SQL are direct representations. If a SQL query looks like |1|2|3|3| then what you actually have, mathematically, is {{1,2,3},{3}}, aka multi-set or bag.

{{1,2,3},{3}} != {1,2,3}

That's what's happening when a row is listed more than once. It does affect the definition of your function.
There's a ton of jargon in there, and no summary is going to really do it justice. Here's some reading material to get you started, though:

http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2005/08/term-sheet-series-wr...
Also factor in tech support costs and the fact that it must earn truly terrible CPM on the ads...

It's never going to make very much money, so why waste any resources on it at all?
I'm pretty sure all GSM phones use SIM cards. Perhaps your old phone was a Verizon or PCS phone.

Those don't use SIM cards, but they aren't GSM and generally aren't used outside North America.
Oh my, only 13+ billion dollars in revenue and 3 billion in net income during one of the worst economic downturns in decades. These numbers are more than Apple and Google combined. Total cash up from 23 billion to 25 billion. The horror.
Ex-Googler still planning tell-all book
Tell HN: I want my karma points back
I was mercilessly downvoted for a joke that at least 9 people didn't get. Here's the post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576077

Just to spell it out for the people who failed to get the allusion: it's the victory theme from Final Fantasy. It plays when you beat the bad guys. It's not an off-topic spam link. On the contrary, it's totally appropriate for a thread about falling real estate prices.

I don't usually care about getting downvoted, especially when I know that I deserve it, which is most of the time, but this rash of downvotes was just ridiculous and embarrassing to the site. I was downvoted to -8 for a quality post, then downvoted further when I explained the allusion.
Additional information on the docs on Yokum's personal blog: http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2009/04/23/what-is-class...
The Drupal memetracker module (admittedly pre-beta) uses Python's Pyclust. With Techmeme, linking is definitely part of it, but not all. I found this out when experimenting with Onespot.com a site that aspires to be, but is not yet, white-label memetracking. They cluster only on links, and as a result, have barely any clusters picked up.

Aside: I think Techmeme does a much better job than Google News, it not only clusters, it kind of threads. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera, who jokes so much you can't tell when he's serious, has said that Techmeme "has always been biased," and I sometimes take that to mean not that it's biased in terms of what's "hot" (that's the political interpretation), but that it's biased in terms of what's a cluster.

Techmeme also recently openly added human curation, but that's a separate level of intervention than the clustering we're talking about.
Ask HN: What's with "Innocuous News"?
I think I missed the joke.
Cool stuff. I just used Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Relevance Vector Machines (RVM) to separate explosives from non-explosives. Worked amazingly well.
Dude, let it go.
I'm a bit annoyed they don't offer prices up-front, but a very nice product. I wonder if you can use a violin device as primary memory or you can only mount it as a fs.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575815
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
True. But you pay a lot for the 3b as an investor. 1% earnings & negligible dividend for a 'monopoly' is not great, even in this low-interest environment. It indicates that the market (and I would guess most HN readers) do not believe MS's 'monopoly' is secure.
Maybe you should organize or something...nah why would you do that with such a fantastic personal healthcare market and rock-solid 401K performance?

I kid...partly. But the answer to all your questions is "organized labor."
They are. Everything they do, they do well.
I remember how you could sell your low slashdot id. Did you try selling your hacker news login on ebay?
It wasn't that funny
In general, I agree with that principle. However, egregiously stupid downmodding is damaging to the discussion. I wouldn't have started this thread over a post that clearly deserved to be downmodded; I'd just be embarrassing myself by drawing more attention to the post.
Funny, I was just about to make the same post.
As a developer of a calorie tracking service, also with an iPhone app in the App Store, I would point out that the example with calorie tracking does not work in RL.

1. There are hundreds of food chains in the US, with widely varying recipes, serving sizes, and nutritional contents. Even being familiar with the subject area, I generally won't be able to recognize a food. Even if I see a burger photo - how would I know the brand, flavor, whether it has cheese in it, etc. The error rate will be huge, rendering the service useless, and even worse - misleading.

2. You cannot estimate portion size on a photo, not having anything to compare with. This also results in significant errors.

I am not arguing against other uses of MT, just pointing out that this is a not very well thought through example.

MT is applicable only for very rudimentary tasks, requiring absolutely zero qualifications and training. There are fewer such tasks around than it looks at the first glance, as this example demonstrates.
I figure either DVD players or probably DVRs will soon connect to the internet to play flash content there. I currently use my Wii to connect to BBC iPlayer but it only has Flash 7 which limits it's use.

What could be disruptive about that is if content companies sell their content directly cutting out the TV network middle man.
Memo to World Leaders
This must be the reason that the large game companies such as EA are completely lack of innovation. They turn out the same games year in and year out with only slightly better graphics, ai, etc...
Weird. RossM and I were just voted down in one swoop. Normally I wouldn't comment on this, but our posts are so innocuous, I can't help but wonder if there's a bug.
Essentially their approach is to make something good enough that is legal to prevent the illegal method taking hold. The music industry could have done with getting that 10 years ago.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/318942

Note that the fix is simple enough, just not for your grandma. The HP Mini 1000's are selling well (because they are awesome) so this is kind of a big bug.
What illusions do porn stars have?
It would perhaps have been nice to post the link to the PDF search site directly, rather than link to the post that links to the search engine.

For those too lazy to read the article, here it is: http://search-pdf-books.com/
i haven't downvote anything in the past year or so because it stiffles my creativity ... downvoter role fits the admin-type ... you know, the uncreative ones

don't bother explaining, argue with an idiot, you become one ... argue with uncreative, you become boring
Thank you for the comment. And I'm pretty sure that you are not someone from our marketing department. :)
[pdf] Rails Security Guide by OWASP
When you talk about likes and dislikes, generalisations do really fall down. For example I have indeed seen code rewritten from scratch because the programmer did not want to spend the mental effort to understand it and liked doing their own thing. I have also seen code re-written from scratch under the greatest reluctance because the original code was so broken.

Generalisations are all very well when they have something to teach us. In the article's case neither the thesis nor the counter-thesis seem particularly illuminating to me.
Even if it were true (and unfortunately it isn't), don't say this like it's a bad thing. Every business which relies on inequities of wealth works to eliminate them. If it succeeds, it will either adapt to a world without inequities or die.
Yorkshire?
See http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2009/04/23/what-is-class...
Chef Achatz is absolutely a hacker. The chapter on him in Michael Ruhlman's _The Reach of a Chef_ is extraordinary.
Not "demands", but "says he will demand".

They are still warming up the press and the public, but when they are going to actually file the complaint is unclear.
Google Corporate Philosophy - Ten Things
"Families with DVRs seem to spend 15-20% of their viewing time watching pre-recorded shows, and skip only about half of all advertisements. This means only about 5% of television is time-shifted and less than 3% of all advertisements are skipped."

I boggle. We never, ever watch live TV under normal circumstances (barring election nights, 9/11, and so on), and the only time ads aren't skipped is when there is nobody in the room to skip them (or watch them). Even with high-interest sporting events broadcast live we start watching half an hour late so that we can skip the ads.

I am at loss to explain those numbers.

Edit: good point below. We have a Dish DVR, and it really is very well done useability-wise.
Go eat there sometime. Highly recommended. =)
The anti-YC.
Real profilers are better for directed optimization, but things like this are super useful for getting ambient awareness of how fast/slow things are and encouraging people to keep things speedy.
I wrote a thing like this (less pretty, but same information + cache stats) in PHP ages ago when I still did web frontend work, based on some ColdFusion thing someone demoed to me.

Total hack, but our site's response times went down a few hundred percent after I enabled it for developers.
I'm surprised at the (Turner Broadcasting-supplied) stats on DVR usage. Since I got a TiVo, watching 'live' TV has become practically intolerable. Even when I want to see something ASAP, I'll do something else for 15-20 minutes to get enough of a buffer I can skip all commercials.
I'm curious. In your woodworking practice, do you use/invent custom jigs to make some of your construction/cutting process faster? What types of projects do you enjoy making?

I ask because the master woodworker I took my one class from had a library of custom jigs. He was also amazing to watch, even when planing a board. Confident and skilled. His passion was making shaker-style chairs. Chairs are hard to make because they have to be constructed properly (so many external stresses from people sitting in it, rocking back etc.)

I loved his philosophy of there is no right way to do something (in the woodshop) - only smarter, faster, and safer. And how he revealed the secret of shims to make a
joint snug.

I could go on and on. Suffice it to say, you can learn a lot by taking a furniture making class, taught by a master.
My mom has a phd and does HITs for fun.
The article complains a lot about how the homeless are treated, but I don't think he is very representative of the homeless population in general. Maybe in Fresno, but in Austin, many of the homeless you see out on the streets are alcoholics or trying to make a living without working. One woman I knew who worked with the homeless said that most of them are trying to avoid responsibility, and a guy I know who used to give out sack lunches to the homeless near campus eventually stopped because after talking to them he realized they weren't just unlucky, they'd chosen that lifestyle. I assume that those who don't want to be homeless have a tendency to go to the ARCH, which has training programs and long-term residency.
Came here to post the same. What a wacky assertion.

Incidentally, I searched for "alan sugar ipod will die" (no quotes), and this page was the #1 Google result. The IndiaTimes article was #3. That doesn't make me confident it was an accurate quote, either.
you pay a lot for the 3b as an investor....It indicates that the market do not believe MS's 'monopoly' is secure.

Your argument makes zero sense. You may believe MS's monopoly is insecure, but if the markets believed that as well, then you wouldn't have to pay so much to own MS. The short term dividend returns would be greater because investors would be expecting capital loss.
Is it time to move beyond 960 pixels?
By your comparison you think you are increasing the status of animals, but really you are decreasing the status of humans.

And once you make humans into animals humans no longer care about such things - animals sure don't.

There is a massive and fundamental difference between animals and humans that no amount of comparing "DNA similarity or neural processes" is going to bridge.

When peta runs ads about humans also being meat, then think people will stop eating animals. But actually what happens is that people think about eating humans.

Do not try to increase animals to the level of humans - it does not work, and it's incorrect.

Instead increase the level of humans even higher, and emphasize the difference to animals even more.
What you describe sounds like the restaurant (hospitality) life cycle.

It's like any entertainment, if it gets stale, people move on. I also think of all those post WW2 neighborhood restaurants and bars that slowly sunk into oblivion.

Here's just one opinion piece on the restaurant topic that lists the following:

Stage 1: Grand Opening & Awesome Service
Stage 2: Building Towards Peak Crowds
Stage 3: Staff and/or Owner Turnover
Stage 4: Sinking Towards Shit Ass Service
Stage 5: Disaster!!!

http://disenchanted.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/the-life-cycle-...
Cargill and food prices
The last time I considered it I was discouraged by a friend for various reasons.

If I do it will have to be for charity; I don't think pg would let me do it in such a way as to keep the cash.
Having used both a Tivo and a Comcast Cable DVR, I'm sure the poor numbers have to do with usability. It sounds cool to have a DVR and for $5 a month the cable company makes it easy. The cable company DVR experience is painful at best. Most commonly it is frustrating and difficult to use, not including the trust that a DVR must earn before you let it time shift your favorite shows. Using Tivo for the past 4+ years I shudder when I use a cable company DVR.
Instead of putting your 401k in stocks and bonds, you should've devoted it to making political contributions. The ROI is far greater, and the volatility much more manageable.
What is Class F common stock?
"For the attack to work, an attacker must have physical access to the victim's computer. The attack can not be done remotely."
Um, so almost any desktop OS in their default installation mode can be vulnerable then... don't see the point of this.
Ask HN: Innocuous News? HN is now IN?
What gives?
Interesting, Apple reports "almost" 29 billion in cash and best non-holidays quarter results in company's history.
During the worst economic downturns in decades. The horror.
I hate RIAs. The feeling seems to be mutual as the app just went blank after the first message box.
What Silicon Valley Can Learn From Zappos
China, UK and others' plan to replace the dollar as global reserve currency
not interesting, stimulating, or significant; pallid; insipid: an innocuous novel

(third definition at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/innocuous)

Should we take a vote on a new name?
someone's already renamed it to Innocuous News
I predicted this post here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576332
Actually: bad timing. it is a buyer's market right now. sorry founders
Is it time to design for 42" lcd tvs and desktop monitors and netbook screens and mobile phones?

I guess we have to keep waiting for http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/#media1 support.
Somebody get this guy a medal!

Lol. Maybe they can make the original post a sticky so people won't keep asking the same thing? Is that even possible on HN?
The music industry is doing a pretty good job of that right now.

It has gotten to the point, for me, that I wouldn't even know where to go to bootleg music anymore. With things like imeem or pandora, I don't need to.

In fact, there was an album I wanted a week or so ago; I had to ask one of my little sisters what was the current tool that people were using to get music (she is in high school). Not wanting to jump through hoops (the website she linked me to was basically a front-end of ? intitle:index.of on google, I fucking loathe peerguardian and didn't feel like renewing my usenet subscription), I just bought the album on iTunes, ran it through qtfairuse (you'll need to downgrade to itunes V6 to do it) and called it good.

They really are starting to figure it out. If you want an example, go to whitelabel.net. It is a tool for DJs to freely download new tracks (and sometimes albums) before they hit store shelves. There are no intrusive sign-up proceedures, just a username/password form, and a download page.

That said, I believe that the RIAA is going to be going away very soon (the arm of it that it suing people, not th arm of it that regulates audio standards...kindof like the IEEE). The "temple" studio model is all but dead. The cost of entry into the music production world has gotten to a point that the small, studio next to your favorite bar (if you're in tempe az, you know what I'm talking about) is cranking out music that is on par with the stuff that the megacorp is.
This story makes me really sad. You know why? Because it means that humans are now so common and cheap that we can use them for menial labor.

People are now cheaper than machines :(

This is a reversal of 2000 years of progress.
BusinessWeek has named the GitHub cofounders among the best young entrepreneurs of 2009
Setting the DataContext of a Popup or MenuBase
Maybe for "Hacker Dollars?"

Hmm, what to do with hacker dollars? T-shirts with "Y" or "[A-Za-z] News?"

Or pool hacker dollars together to promote and improve some charitable organizations' websites.
I remember being amused in 1996, that some newbie web developers were writing their html to work best with a specific number of pixels of width... I don't find it so funny these days.
Or if you use it via Lynx.
Markov models, not markov chains. Close though.
There are hints of it, how to deal with authority, even where to be homeless (CSU campus good). Also, if you are interested you would start to explore the directory tree this doc is in and see even more details.

It seems to me that homelessness IS a hack on the regular system. And the way he writes about what happens is informed by his intelligence and his programmer background. To me, the idea of a homeless guy running sims to develop his solution to efficient routing of a traveling salesman while not having a place to plug in his laptop which is his own is pretty hacky.

Maybe this article isn't EVERYTHING you would want in a clever and enjoyable read from a homeless programmer, but it may be the best out there in this genre. This was not a New York Times reporter playing a homeless person, this is the real thing. BTW, I worked with this guy briefly, so I know he is the real thing.