skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, I've had some really good one-on-one customer support experiences via Twitter. I don't need hand holding, but sometimes it's just nice to get pointed to the right url for what I'm looking for without having to craft the perfect Google query. Twitter is great for that - just fire off the quick question, get a reply pointing to more detailed instructions. I don't know if it's scalable, but it's worked when I've needed it.
That's not true. What nonsense statistics are you using? There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK. How quaint it is to contradict someone with vague and controversial statistics.
CrunchGear post about it: "Leaks are always hardest when they hit home."

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/09/crunchtablet-hits-the-n...
>We need a new economic model for goods with real production cost but no reproduction cost.

Not only do I think that is impossible but I'm not convinced that it is a good idea. Has any economist ever done any quantitative analysis when the marginal cost of (re)production is zero? I suspect that there are only obvious models that answer the question by saying that goods with production costs of zero should be priced at zero. In the short term there are all sorts of things you can do to maximize profits when the marginal cost is zero, but in the long run the price will fall to zero.

This wistful hope that recorded music will be worth anything is kind of like my wistful hope that a viable economic system will come along that doesn't have a nasty tendency to concentrate the wealth in the hands of those that already have the capital.

Is that future you hope for really better than the one where something with a marginal cost of zero is priced in the market as it should be? I strongly suspect that the total amount of music recorded over time will continue to increase even as the cost falls to zero. I'm not sure what is so great about being able to sell digital music anyways. The limited editions seem infinitely superior to me as a consumer and are a great way to add a little bit of scarcity to a good that isn't scarce.
I can use the word Twitter around a non-programmer and they understand what I'm saying? Twitter persists messages? Twitter is public? The Twitter API is drop-dead simple? Twitter popularized asymmetrical following?
Wow, for a second I thought I was reading HN... but then I realized that Reddit just changed their CSS today.

(Downmod me some more. I can lose at most 8 karma points per post, and I have almost 5000 karma. You aren't hurting my feelings, but you are hurting the community by taking a Reddit-like approach to suppressing opinions you don't want to hear. I mean, seriously? I am having trouble making sense of this, as I've never seen it happen before here.)
Plus it provides a support system when things go wrong. And yes, things will go wrong. Something always goes wrong in a startup. But hopefully there are more highs than there are lows.
Why Google App Engine Shouldn't Include PHP
Goodbye Kindle, we barely knew ya
VHS spawned a whole new industry called "Home Entertainment" (almost 3x bigger than box office sales) from which entertainment companies have reaped countless extra billions (www.mpaa.org/USEntertainmentIndustryMarketStats.pdf)

Do you realize that you are suggesting that it may be better if you were to search google and the top link went to digg for each search, instead of the content creators' site. At scale if this were to be in effect (which I highly doubt would ever happen) this would undemocratize the web by piping everything through one massive content provider.
I think you're misinterpreting exceptions in so much that you feel they need to be unexpected. Say you have a list like [[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]. You could count each of the lists and loop through them individually, or you could create a recursive function that assumes a flat list and switches when an index error occurs:

def wtf(l, count=0):
cl = l[0]
try:
return wtf(cl[count:], count+1)
except IndexError:
# Reverse the list and start over
cl = l[::-1]
return wtf(cl, 0)

Hopefully that gets my point across. Basically, exceptions are very useful, and there is nothing wrong with expecting and catching their throws under certain circumstances.
There is a direct link to the page in the digg bar itself and when clicked, the "fuck you" message remains (the digg bar disapears). Does the referrer change depending on which frame the request comes from?
position:absolute only behaves that way relative to a positioned parent -- if the parent doesn't have the position attribute set, it keeps looking up the hierarchy until it finds one that is (or is the root).
I would say to precompute anything the user could run to make things run faster, however accurate anticipation of user needs is really hard.

I only thought of these tasks:

In a word processing: we can load grammar and nlp engines and download and analyze trends in web text for improve suggestions in nearly real time, also trying to understand what the user is writing and aiding to improve not only orthography and grammar but style too, for example.

In Web search, personalizing the whole searching and browsing experience downloading and processing partial results and with intelligent assistants running in the background (this is my favorite).
Undercover at Walmart [longer than the old version]
Murder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US. In my own personal experience it's also much more indiscriminate in the UK. It's rather easy to avoid trouble in the US, whereas you have high rates of home invasion in the UK in middle class neighborhoods, for example.
The bar is definitely a shady, unneeded annoyance. However, I wouldn't worry too much about it hijacking the SEO for your site by not using a 301 redirect.

That might certainly be the case right now, but with Digg's size I doubt Google will let the lack of a 301 prevent them from recognizing what's going on.
They serve different purposes. Reading for extended periods of time on a device such as the Crunchpad, iPhone, LCD, etc., is torture.
> The US is one of those most xenophobic first world Western nations I know of

Are you fucking kidding me? You have national front and neo-nazis sitting in european parliaments and councils.
The Digg bar is not just unethical, it's plain annoying. What happens if I want to bookmark the page? What happens when I want to copy-paste the actual URL into an email? What happens if I'm using a text-only browser? What about a mobile browser? What if I wish to scrape my Twitter stream for links and I can't get to the actual URL (this is actually something I'm playing with)?

Frankly, I don't see the point of this. This will just confuse and annoy users and steal valuable link-love from content producers.
The quote in the title is kind of silly: do something awesome? Well, yeah.

But I thought the second part was more interesting:

"Try not to get caught up in the echo chamber. That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do something original.

A lot of things are evolutionary, and it is easy to get caught up on what the geek subculture thinks."

That's actually hard because you have to explain why that new technology/app/gadget is so cool and interesting. It might be evident to you as a geek/hacker, but if the gap with mainstream is too big, it will get lost.
I see his point, but I'm not sure that "go fuck yourself" is the most effective way of making it. http://digg.com/d1oNOZ
Was that really an appropriate topic for a white paper?
I like venturehacks (actually a lot) but blogs in general have just as much "de-valued themselves into the garbage can." At least when you are in an MBA program you receive information from different disciplines (HR, Strategy, Operations, etc, etc.) With blogs you first have to get past the fact that the top 20 are just one big echo-chamber.
Doesn't Facebook do pretty much the exact same thing?
Capacitive touchscreen! I was pleasantly surprised, I thought it would be resistive. Almost all Windows Tablets have inductive digitizers, where you can only use a special stylus (like a Wacom), but you get angle/distance/pressure information.

Most new Tablet PCs also cost 6-10 times more, and have awful battery life because they are overpowered.
The data for both Mac and Windows machines is a few months old. So the paper had to be reviewed and revised after the first draft was written--this is exactly what one would expect for a white paper.

The first half of this article completely fails to back up its headline. Data analysis happens on data from the past. That's how writing papers works.

Some of the criticisms near the end seem valid, but by that point it's hard to take them seriously.
The trade-off of losing some percentage of registered users and keeping quality high might well be worth it. If the site's user base is growing by an order of magnitude every year, it probably wouldn't hurt to lose users.

At least, it's worth it if the alternative is becoming the next reddit.
Whole heartedly agree. That this article can make front page is the reason HN gets the majority of my reading time each day.
I happen to like Target more as well, but I really don't mind going to, or the idea of Wal-Mart either. However, the article does read shady...
Yawn. The downmodding here just gets more and more crazy :) I only said that because I have seen multiple single pages like that hit the front page. Did not realize it was such a controversial thing to joke about.
I don't understand why it had to be TC to create this device. Its usefulness is blatantly obvious; all Arrington did was list the specs and declare his intention to have it made.

To rephrase, why hasn't the industry been able to do this? They are the ones who have made this possible anyhow; it is not very innovative on a technical level; it is obviously a good idea. What took them so long?
My ignorance will show here, but I would imagine engineering one of those devices is nothing trivial (duh), let alone something that a small company could afford. I wasn't even aware that TechCrunch developed consumer products. Can someone enlighten me on how a company such as TechCrunch can reasonably expect to design, develop, and sell (they have 2/3 of those down) a tablet (netbook) and profit? There are seemingly high barriers to entry in such a market, are there not? Just curious!
Actually, Digg is probably big enough to avoid any penalties for doing a different redirect based on user-agent. I.e. 301 redirects for non-human useragents instead of forcing them to go through their framejacked page.

We're actually experimenting with this on tinyarrows, using a full 301 redirect for bots but we test for the preview cookie for other useragents and give them a javascript redirect in that case. We kind of have to do the latter since we support so many different incoming domains, we need a way to test the cookie through a central domain, but don't want to eat SEO juice.
I agree whole-heartedly with that statement.

However, I've seen quite a few startups funded by YC and other incubators break up because one guy thought he had to have a token co-founder and that person wasn't ultimately into it.

So I wonder if this sort of attitude is a good thing, or if it just means "If you're a single founder, get someone to apply with you so you get in."
Your thoughts parallel mine. At the very least, if this idea is so brilliant, why can't a company like Dell or Apple begin mass-producing these little tikes? Even with patents and all that legal mumbo-jumbo, I'm sure they could find something to sell. Makes me wonder if this product really will sell, or if the biggies just lost out on an early opportunity.
Assuming he uses Apache, why not just use a RewriteCond for that referrer and redirect to such a page? Executing that regex on every page is a performance hit, and generally I prefer to use Apache for stuff like this.

If you do use the supplied PHP code on your website, I recommend using strpos() or strstr() instead of preg_match().
It is a daring way of making it.
A few points:

1. Some of my favorite places. I was dragged up those goddamn nightmare stairs very early on living in SF.

2. SF is cool, because of the high cost of living, cheap labor doesn't necessarily mean cheap, or unskilled.

3. What's the point?
As does HootSuite: http://hootsuite.com/

Personally, I don't get why Gruber is so upset. There is an option to always hide the DiggBar. Hover over the X on the right and click the down arrow. Then there's a link that sets a cookie so you never see it again.

To me, he just sounds like a grumpy old man. The thing is useful, simple, and non-intrusive if you don't want to see it. No need to get profane about it...
Or you can just use the DiggBar disable feature that it provides.
It goes against the grain of the web, that's why. Sites that connect so many users to so much content should not do that.
No offense, but "long time" is the operative phrase. It's old.
>why can't a company like Dell or Apple begin mass-producing these little tikes?

If these tablets sell, they certainly will.
"No, wait...." moment in 3..2..1
I think, the join-akwardness in python mostly is a single-dispatch issue. Both variants, glue.join(sequence) and sequence.get_joined_by(glue) make some sort of sense, however, neither strikes all readers as the one obvious thing that obviously is right. (Compare similar single dispatch issues like: Will the employee have a add_to_department or will the department have a get_new_employee?)
Thus, I think, the cleanest solution would be a generic method join(glue, string) so you just call join('\n', lines). This removes the question if the glue is more responsible in the join process or if the sequence is more important in the join process, because both are equally important.
may stop a business being so profitable.
> it is not very innovative on a technical level

seems like an ideal product for a y combinator startup!
It's not controversial, it was just a shit comment that added absolutely nothing to the conversation.
Since they call it a "living document" in the beginning, I assume this is a starting outline, and most of those one-line pages will become filled in.
Just in case you are not aware about it, here is how this 'venture' started:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-w...

Updates:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/30/update-on-the-techcrunc...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/techcrunch-tablet-updat...
the link is in the context of the digg domain, so if you click it, even though the bar is no longer present, the referrer (or should I say referer) will still be digg.com. interestingly, if you ctrl-r, the same HTTP_REFERER header will be sent. but ctrl-l, cr will blank the header & you'll get the regularly scheduled content.
Site5 coupon code 20% discount for april 2009
Site5 coupon code 20% discount for april 2009, site5review.org
Self-Reliance by Emerson [scribd]
It seems like one of the things that exist when a medium is young and there aren't that many people using it. There were probably some celebs you could email in 1990 (or IM in 1997) and have them reply. I doubt this will last if Twitter grows much.
Cloud services can cure common cold now
Come on now guys. This book was written by a pop psychologist. He may have interesting theories, but he isn't exactly Genghis Khan.

This is one step too close to Opera's book club.
They're not being advertised as a URL shortener though.
Takes more than $5k to make a device like this. Much more.
Is HYIP For You?
HYIP stands for High Yield Investment Program. Often people treat HYIP with suspicion because they have valid reasons to do so; they have either become a loser themselves or seen one of the friends or acquaintances losing. Therefore, it is often considered a risky avenue to make money. We rarely meet people who tell us that they have made lot of money through HYIP. All the success stories that we hear about HYIP funds are found only in the websites. All these make us wonder whether HYIP is real and even if it is real whether it is for us.
Right on the money. Markdown is great and doesn't get too crazy with added syntax for every html entity under the sun that you might want to produce.

In the past I've tried using Markdown for all my docs and failed. Sometimes you just need more control and must use something like LaTeX. Other times you just want to write a README or a few paragraphs that may be converted to html -- these uses are Markdown's bread and butter.
"Atlanta is a beautiful place in the summer."

I thought they called it "Hotlanta" cuz it's hot and humid. No?
Instead of doing more work with idle cores, why not spread the work out amongst them? This might provide a net savings in power consumption...

Given that technologies like speedstep allow the voltage and frequency of a cpu to be modified dynamically, and that power consumption is governed by P = CV^2f:

Say we have a CPU with 4 cores with each core equivalent to a 1.6 GHz Pentium M. According to Wikipedia, the clock frequency on such a device can be stepped in 200 MHz increments over the range from 1.6 to 0.6 GHz. At the same time, the voltage requirement decreases from 1.484 V to 0.956 V.

So, say you have a workload that keeps one 1.6GHz core pegged to near 100%. Instead, why not spread this work to 3 cores, while lowering the speed to 0.6GHz and the voltage to 0.956V?

This would be equivalent to a 1.8GHz machine.

Would this save energy? The original power factor is:

1 core * (1.484^2) * 1.6 = 3.52

The new power factor is:

3 cores * (0.956^2) * 0.6 = 1.645

So, about half the power for this example. Of course, nothing is perfect, and spreading your workload amongst 3 cores will lose efficiency, and gain implementation complexity.
Why does Microsoft care about the Mac? It could be because the iPhone is giving Apple lots of positive publicity. And this in turn may result in more people buying Macs.
The argument being made is unclear. Is the author saying that Google App Engine should not support PHP because PHP is not a robust language? If so, that's not a very persuasive argument.

More importantly, this is a very poor piece of writing, the worst I've seen in some time. For starters, the author would do well to learn how to write a thesis statement:

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/thesis.html
Even if you buy the idea that the white paper's content required months of study and analysis, requiring it to be based on obsolete data--which is a great big stretch--there's surely no defense for the fact that it doesn't acknowledge that it's old data and in fact speaks of the systems in the present tense.
Those occur constantly on the site. And even hackers are allowed to make jokes.
Tell HN: I Admire a Flame-free Online Culture
My favorite part of the Hacker News guidelines

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

is the part that says, "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. 'That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." I love that phrase "can be shortened to" as a gentle reminder of the right thing to do.

This post is to express the opinion that being largely flame-free is what makes Hacker News especially valuable to its participants. I'd also like to make a friendly suggestion of an extension of that principle. From time to time, persons post here articles written by or referring to controversial authors, living or dead. I've seen several references, for example, to the late Stephen Jay Gould, and multiple references to George Soros or to Michael Arrington. I have a friendly suggestion: if you disagree with Gould, or with Soros, or with Arrington, follow the example in the guideline and write, "I disagree with the factual statement made by that author, because the correct fact is . . . " I make this suggestion because, as old as I am, I already know that Gould, Soros, Arrington, and a cast of thousands are controversial in their opinions and disregarded by many. But I'd like to know the underlying facts.

Consider the radical possibility that any person you disagree with in general might accidentally make a correct factual statement in a particular case. Or consider the possibility that identifying someone as a bête noire

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bete+noire

doesn't have enough explanatory power in identifying an error in a factual statement made by the person. Or consider the factual statement that arguing ad hominem is considered a logically invalid form of argument.

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

I'm just bringing this up as praise for a job well done by the participants on the forum and as a friendly suggestion for further improvement.
Does Dark Energy Really Exist?
The way I see it, the flaw with the argument here is that Steve is assuming that writing law is like writing working production code in a modern imperative or object-oriented language. It isn't. If the law is like code, it's fundamentally different from most computer code you've ever seen before. The closest analogue in the domain of programming languages would perhaps be Prolog and even that is stretching the analogy beyond the breaking point.

The legislature doesn't write complete code or even a complete specification of anything. They just write top level stubs and the stubs are executable because the "programming language" for the law supports intelligent code generation agents (government agencies), an agent-based pattern recognition engine (law enforcement), and an intelligent agent-based JIT conflict resolution engine (the courts) to evaluate the performance of the pattern recognition engine and throw exceptions as needed. The law enforcement part of the system is the only part that even remotely resembles the sort of deterministic computation that we're used to (i.e. if your behavior fits the pattern for an illegal act, the police will probably follow the rule and arrest you).

If the law were code, a legalization law for marijuana would look something like the following:

pattern_rule_class(a : person, b : marijuana)

def_rule_maker(USDOT; {a.transport(b), a.operate(c : motor_vehicle) && a.consume(b)})

def_rule_maker(USDA; {a.advertise(b), a.produce(b)})

def_rule_maker(ATF; {a.sell(b, c : person), a.consume(b, c : location)}

def_rule_enforcer(FBI; {a.transport(b, c : jurisdiction::interstate), a.sell(b, c : jurisdiction::interstate)})

def_rule_enforcer(select_agent using state_ruleset; {a.transport(b, c : jurisdiction::intrastate), a.sell(b, c : jurisdiction::intrastate})

def_rule_resolver(judiciary)
ifndef ruleset by_date '1/1/2010'
use default_ruleset

define default_ruleset

(a : person, b : marijuana) : {

a.consume(b)->legal where location(a)==home(a),

a.produce(b)->legal where quantity(b) <= unit_plants(PLANT_LIMIT),

a.possess(b)->legal where quantity(b) <= unit_mass_ounces(POSSESSION_LIMIT),

a.sell(b)->illegal,

a.operate(c : motor_vehicle) && a.consume(b)->illegal,

a.transport(b, c : jurisdiction::intrastate)->illegal,

else _default->illegal
}

define default_penalty_ruleset

.... etc., etc., etc. and so on
Simple. Instead of our market research in the target demographics show that the average consumer wants... it was more like yaknow whatd be awesome!?.
48 Laws and 33 Strategies are excellent. Greene himself is in no way comparable to those he quotes in his books, but he synthesized an excellent compilation of knowledge nonetheless.
I understand your point, and respect it. I, however, use a nickname I've been using for some time. Last year, I ran for election (I came in dead last). If I had to associate my handle with my real name, I'd log off and never frequent any forum or blog ever again. Not only would political opponents use nasty snippets from anything I might have every posted in the past few decades, I'd also get ridiculed on boards and fora with incessant ad hominem attacks of "oh you're only saying that because you're an evil $POLITCAL_PARTY politican!"
How crafty to have it say "Reddit Rules." If Microsoft did this it would say "Microsoft" or the product name.