skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
heard of the game "evens or odds"? Each party can choose their own trusted random number generator to decide to play "even" or "odd"
Amazingly Fun Photo Manipulations by Erik Johansson
Where's the remotest place on Earth?
BrowserCouch is an in-browser MapReduce  implementation
Cheat Sheets for Jquery, CSS, HTML, PHP and more
Realistic Online Income vs. The Job Loss Blues
This topic is explored in the Thursday Next series of novels by Jasper Fforde. Really. He's not taken seriously enough for most people to include him in the scifi cannon, but he deserves to be.
oh dear ! sorry for resubmitting it...i am (still) under the impression that submitting old stories would automagically send me back to the orginial submission.
Infrastructure: So What's OVF all about?
Why is no one questioning which way the causation arrow is pointing in such studies?
Fear of Forking essay
>Would you place your chips on a guy who can't organise his life without the aid of pills?

Would you place your chips on a guy who can't see beyond arm's length without eyeglasses? How about one incapable of regulating his own blood sugar without insulin injections?
The right to party? No, I'm serious, why should they be any different from us? I say we clone them and see if they can survive in modern society.
No kidding.

How is delivering a good user experience and designing a product-appropriate development process Apple's property? Shouldn't everyone who writes software try to do those things?
Don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int
Very cool idea. I'm still trying to figure out what good this would be though.
Android: New Cupcake Features
I think he was referring to the fact that they're trying to centralize more what everything is happening into the different sections in charge of developping windows and it's subsets.
I don't think OOP is at an end. In fact, I think newer functional languages are giving it new life (and giving us alternative ways to use OOP). Consider clojure. It's fully object-oriented, but not in the traditional way (although you can still use Java objects).
A number of smaller Python-based projects were denied, but the Python Software Foundation was pretty generous in accepting projects that are using Python rather than working on Python itself. If you check out http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/python you'll see that Sphinx, PySoy, NumPy, and others are getting work done under the PSF umbrella, instead of under each specific project's leadership.

I think things were done this way to reduce organizational overhead, but now I'm just speculating.
Stephen Hawking expected to recover from infection
That's some pretty good photoshoppin'. I wouldn't mind seeing some basic tutorials to go with the shots..
Do you have any comments on it (or is it still a preorder)? I see we can't even have a peek on the table of contents.

By the way, HN, what would be your advise for a good technical book on "cracking". I mean, not a collection of ad-hoc recepies, but some generic knowledge, however something where you don't hesitate to open your gdb/wireshark/etc.. : for example I remember I enjoyed reading http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html a long time ago.
I hope Hawking is the first man to achieve immortality (if he desires it), just to spite this guy.
It's not that bad when n=263.
* Lots of people smoke in Egypt, Greece, and France, but none of those countries is a trailblazing economy.*

You're not thinking like an evolutionary biologist. Sure, poor societies smoke same as successful ones, but where are the largely non-smoking societies? (...and no, the US doesn't count, seeing as how the anti-smoking movement is only a couple decades old) I'm not saying that smoking is a cure-all (HA!). What I'm saying is that, in the past, smoking seems to have been better than not.

What's interesting is that, now that life past 60 is a very real possibility for some societies, will smoking still remain advantageous. Here, I would agree with you, that the answer is probably no.
High-profile speakers from the security industry gather at the Hack in the Box conference
It's like digital M.C. Escher
I'm really glad to hear that, he's a true hero.
The contrast here is being made between two development styles: A centralized, controlled, and focused production system at Apple, versus what Microsoft apparently had before Windows 7: A network of fiefdoms which fought each other over implementation and design details but nevertheless had to secure each others' approval for changes. This brought about stalemates and some truly bizarre outcomes. Here's the famous story about the Windows shutdown menu relating to this:

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

If Microsoft has overcome these [alleged] problems, it would represent a significant change in their development style.
Don't like 3 select fields in your Ruby on Rails time_select? Mine only has 1
Functional Solution for the Shortest Path Problem
Coding the Tweet: Building a Custom Branded Twitter Application
I'm really tempted to make a joke about car insurance and/or Geico, but this is Hacker News and it's serious business around here.
40+ years and still going!!
Most of us know this service as Western Union (and their ilk).

Interesting historical basis, though.
Saw it this morning too :) Not as good as the perl and regex one (http://xkcd.com/208/) but really nice.
New nucleotide could revolutionize epigenetics
Importance of DCPROMO Command in Domain Controller Installation
Now that would be outright cruel.
"The team tried to build an operating system...with manners, not one that constantly interrupts with bubbles, boxes and warnings that, data showed, people ignored or raced to close.

The Windows groups agreed in principle but old habits often reared up. Many Windows teams still wanted to be able to create alert bubbles for their functions.

"We've probably talked to every team in Windows about, 'No no no no, we don't want you to pop your notifications. Windows is not going to use these notifications to tell users things,'""

Great, getting rid of popup dialogs and notifications sounds like a huge step in the right direction - people are so used to not understanding or caring what they say they just ignore them anyway.
"More research and testing yielded a solution - the ribbon, which displayed different commands depending on what the PC user was doing. Then Larson-Green pushed Microsoft to get even more radical: to release Office 2007 without the hedge of a "classic mode" that would emulate the old look and feel for people who didn't like the changes."

The ribbon almost gives me a stroke every time I have to use office. I've always said that whoever developed it should be drug out into the street and shot. well apparently now we know who it was. The odd thing is that microsoft considered the ribbon a success?! even more stunningly they put ribbon lady in charge of their next OS. I swear it seems that microsofts enemies are making their top level corporate decisions.

This spells doom for windows 7.
I like the walkthrough of the Enomalism UI and find it more useful than the actual install tips. Wonder why KVM was chosen over Xen?
You can peek on Amazon, and it's $26 pre-order (available on 23rd, it seems?).

http://www.amazon.com/Gray-Hat-Python-Programming-Engineers/...
Hmmm... I don't really like this comment and the fact that it's being upvoted.

Regarding 1) Why are you going on over 6 sentences to explain that capital (just like labor) commands a return on investment in the marketplace, while the simple message being delivered is that in fact there is a perceived anomaly going on with these exceptional capital growth rates. If the system, of how the Fed hands out money to banks and creates the incentive for a false bubble, is the problem at hand, then an answer citing a lesson in capital markets is not helpful.

Regarding 2) Again, I don't like this short-sighted smack-down. Actually, I like this quote. Well, if I buy an asset (own it) then I have made an implicit judgement to how I assess the value of the stock. So thereby the fluctuation compared against this base value does very well matter to me.

Regarding 3) In a time of failure of capital markets the answer to the problem voiced here seems to be "self-interest". Again, a short-sighted smack-down with a resolve that sounds catchy. The answer to this whole financial mess does not lie in the private sector, for capital markets, as they have shown, are quite narrow-minded. Bad oversight has led to this. The solution lies in looking at long-term effective regulation, which goes beyond the perspective that narrow-minded self-interest can deliver. The Chicago school of thought in Economics truly has suffered in 2008.

Sorry, reading the article again... the point is valid, that blind belief in non-educated financial advisors (basically the equivalent of used-cars salesmen) or profit-motivated pros is deadly.
Good question, so the heart of smoothed analysis is that you need your problem to have the property that there is some sort of small perturbation you can apply to the input data such that there is accordingly only a similarly small shift to the answer the algorithm computes. Once you have that determined, you then try to show that with high probability the runtime of the algorithm on the randomly perturbed data is polynomial on the input size.

So in a certain sense, the strength of smoothed analysis is that by applying a small amount of noise to a problem (which you can sometimes argue is simply the process of solving it with fixed precision etc), you can destroy any fragile counterexamples to a good execution speed.

Theres a bit more going on, but thats the basic idea
My favorite take on this topic is the novel "Les Animaux dénaturés" by French author Jean Bruller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bruller).
I love the ribbon in Office 2007. It took a while to "get" the paradigm shift, but it works. As a developer, I don't use Office that much, but when I do, all of the commands I need are just a ribbon away. No more hunting through tabs of preferences or endless menus. It's also not just Microsoft that considers the ribbon a success, many other users do and they've won awards for the innovative UI.
The 42 minutes to anywhere idea is covered briefly as well. It's like it's Fforde day. And I'll never complain about Fforde day.
FP plus lighter and more dynamic objects doesn't sound like the end of OOP supremacy, but rather another stage of it. I'm curious to see where it leads / what comes out of it.
"as a developer"
this seems to be the problem with microsofts new user interfaces. The tech elite may like them, but they are impossible for the ordinary user. I posit that the vast majority of non technical end users utterly hate hate hate the ribbon. I imagine the same thing will happen with windows 7. In fact we've already been seeing it; the tech elite trying out the beta are liking it, which means that it will be unusable from the end user's perspective.
Django already does this quite well:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/legacy-databases/

So it's hopefully something else.
The problem is when I want some relatively obscure command, like to record a macro. I had to google where the menu had gone because it was a feature you had to go into the system options to turn on. The ribbon looks pretty, but it's worse than the hidden "context-sensitive" menus that only show you the most used commands. The ribbon could be much better if it changed according to the user's knowledge and capabilities, and gave power users the more familiar list of everything.
Wasn't there an entire image gallery site dedicated to cute chicks with headsets?
Ask HN : What do you think of our new app design? (plus the history of it)
Agreed. While I'm the type of person who wants to play with everything new and shiny, I had no problems adjusting to the ribbon, and I think it was a fantastic step forward in usability.

I think the ribbon(and all of Office 2k7) was a huge step forward for UI in general, and they executed it amazingly well. (I'm not a fanboy for any side of the OS world, I go between all of the OS's).
Using iframes for cross-site scripting
I find it interesting how bad of a image Vista has. While there were obviously issues right off the bad with hardware incompatibilities, etc...it turned out to be a really solid OS from my end. I used it for over a year and a half with fewer problems than I had with XP.

Most people just seem to "know" that Vista is a terrible OS. The read some forum post that heard that it was terrible, or they saw some random news story a while back saying people weren't too happy with Vista. I've even heard some people claim it was Windows Me all over again.

Then you have some of the "advice" people give out for Vista users. My favorite, of course, is that the first thing a Vista user should do is completely disable UAC. Now, sure, those pop-ups can be annoying, but I'd prefer a quick second of annoyance when loading up a program over executables starting off silently with admin privileges.

In any case, I've used the Windows 7 beta as my main OS for a couple months now and haven't had any issues so far.
Everyday users never like change, sometimes change is needed to move forward.

If you honestly think that Apple doesn't do this, then you should compare the user experience from Jaguar to Leopard, while there is a lot of similarity, a LOT has changed as well, and people had to adjust to it.

Just because people don't like change, doesn't mean there should never be change. Isn't that part of the issue that holds innovation back when it comes to Microsoft? They could of done something drastic like Apple and dropped support for their old OS (Classic > OSX) instead of catering to the masses, and probably produced a better product, but they can't upset the masses who are 'used' to things.
Card Shuffling - The Riffle Shuffle
Ask HN: Good outsourced XHTML/CSS development companies?
Does anyone have any experience with outsourced XHTML/CSS developers? People like http://www.psd2html.com/ or http://www.psd2htmlninjas.com/ ?
I'm trying to find a high quality supplier but haven't got any first or second hand experience with these sorts of companies.

Quality of work and turnaround time are the most important factors for us, as I would expect it is for most people.
Fascinating... wikipedia mentions using nuclear power to achieve the 1300-1700C temperature needed for the rock melting. (BTW, the smooth glassy tunnel is a byproduct of that). I wonder if you could achieve the same thing using plasma arcs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Converter), then somehow use the pressure and heat of the earth, once you're deep enough?
What are these renegade cybergeeks doing at the New York Times? Maybe saving it.
I would get under the hood of metasploit and see where that takes you. Or read the old phracks. Even four years ago phrack was talking about inserting kernel modules without root perms. Neat stuff!
All those observations are coming from a technical person's point of view. One thing that MS doesn't seem to get is that first impressions matter, they matter a lot. I bought a computer that came with Vista. It took me close to 5 minutes - I'm not kidding - to start up the machine to the point I was able to use anything. And it was very slow even afterwards. You just can't convince a regular person, after having such an experience, that Vista is great. You can't wash away those bad feelings with an SP or with your positive testimony. You just can't. Regular folks are far more emotional than that. This is something we as developers have to remind ourselves every day.
Why is it that as we age, time seems to race along?
Madonna AzəriBlogun T-shirtın Geyib?
I'm torn. As I write this on a Vista box, I keep thinking that I should finally cut the cord, suck it up, and start using Ubuntu as my primary OS (it's installed on a VM now). However, I'm worried about the short-term loss of productivity.

But, like you said, Vista ain't that bad. Most stuff just works. I actually like UAC as a protection mechanism, but I understand why the questions posed are important.
Those who are new to any version of Office like the ribbon. For those who used previous versions and know where stuff is it takes a little bit of adjusting, but they end up liking it too.
And InnoDB
Also curious. Horizontal scaling, distribution, concurrency; that's where I see the tech heading. I think whatever will make those easier to deal with will have a huge advantage going forward.
The language designers' dilemma
In the exact same boat here. Using stimulants is the most obvious solution to meeting ever rising demands, but is it the best? I agree with you that working hard is a difficult pill to swallow (har har), especially when the benefits of said work are--at most--nebulous.

Unfortunately, I am not smart or clever enough to avoid these traps of society and--like you--willingly grind myself into a soulless nub trying to work my way to the next level. My consolation (and perhaps yours too) is that going through this experience relatively early in life has taught me quite a bit about how things work. No one should need stimulants to achieve that.
Well, take this statement --

"In 2006, a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends."

The results cited in the article seem to only imply a correlation. It seems like the author of the article implied causation to add a bit of journalistic flair. After all, it would be a much less interesting article if it simply stated correlations.
The coolant would only need to last 42 minutes if you thought it could never get stuck.
Rating WCM and ECM vendor web sites for page loadability using YSlow
Link spam. The actual artist's site is http://www.alltelleringet.com/
JavaScriptDB: Persevere’s New High-Performance Storage Engine
I always thought that, as a child, we differentiate, and everything we experience splits into new branches, creating intelligence, whereas when we get older, we assimilate, everything we experience gets merged into a previous experience or understanding, creating wisdom.
Apple Trumps Microsoft, Google as Tech Monopolist
Live From London - TechCrunch Geek’n Rolla
They would get Neanderthals rights. They get a copy of Human rights if they wish and then we will make a deal, each race gets what it needs.
Mammoth might be delicious. How can we know unless we try?
Will Samsung be The 1st Vendor in Europe?
Functional Programming Primer
I am not a professional, but can share my personal experience. (looking at ss5u.png)

1. TimmyOnTime has a shadow and the following text - "time tracking..." does not, besides they have different fonts (I understood later that TimmyOnTime is a logo and the following text is an explanation, but at the first time I was confused)

2. I would make the header text giving the most important message bigger and cleaner.

3. The main picture on the page makes no sense to me. I see 6 different images: Address book? (what does your app do with it?) Adium (I don't know what it is) AOL instant messaging (I am using ICQ, Jabber and Skype) and 3 other images below having no meaning to me. Then 2 minutes later I notice the text explaining that I can use your app with Google talk, MSN and aim.

4. It seems to me that text on your button has more space on top then on bottom (is it your intention?)

5. Your customer feedback uses the smallest font, gray color on a white background what makes it hard to read and notice, I would value my customers most of all and make their feedback more noticeable.

Once again I am not a professional, just a software developer and these are my personal thoughts and impressions.
Ages After Yahoo And Google, Microsoft Finally Enables Web-Based IM In Hotmail
I think that the thesis here is true, but the statement "communities that X cease to have X when any old person is allowed in" applies not just for values of X == "intelligent discourse", but also for X == "group-think leftism", "group-think rightism", etc.

Shirky nailed it here:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."

Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.

Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you're interfering with the religious text.

Sometime the religious texts are opinions, sometimes they're people, sometime they're both.

I was a semi-frequent commentor on a popular blog. I'd spoken to one or two of the founders of the blog on the phone a few times, had done some business with them, and all-in-all had a cordial relationship, even though we differed on major-party-politics.

Then the popular blog hired a well known blogger to do their moderation. This well known blogger had a VERY strong political stance ... and brought with her to the group blog a bunch of her alcolytes.

A few times someone would post "politician X did Y and is the worst person ever". And I responded calmly "ummm...didn't politician Z do the exact same thing? Are they both the worst person ever, or might the situation be a bit more nuanced?".

...and for that, the moderator censored my comments.

I appealed to the founders of the blog, they agreed that I had said nothing untoward, the moderator was talked to ... and then the same thing happened two more times.

At that point I gave up on the group blog.

If they were willing to tolerate a bit of intelligent dissent from the orthodoxy, I was happy to be there ... but if the purpose of the group blog was veneration of the religious texts ... well, I've got better things to do with my time.

So... it is true that moderating can increase the IQ of a conversation. ...but it can also increase all sorts of other things: insularity, group-think, distrust of dissenting voices, etc.
While I agree that users generally ignore notification bubbles in Windows, how should users receive notifications? I mean, sometimes you really do have to tell people stuff. Is it OK to pop up a notification bubble if you only do it every once in a while?

I feel pretty certain that a notification bubble is better than any system that steals focus from another window without responding to a user action.

Is there another accepted way of delivering notifications that I'm not thinking of?
You just can't convince a regular person, after having such an experience, that Vista is great.

I wonder how many "regular" users jumped on board at the very beginning while there were still issues? I rarely have talked to someone who has actual experience with the problems from Vista (other than it being included on a system with poor performance, which was an issue, I'll admit).

If Vista really was a poor OS, then Windows 7 would be just putting 'lipstick on a pig'.
I always thought it was just down to this:

The year from one's birth to one's first birthday is one's whole life.

The year from one's first birthday to one's second birthday is half of one's life.

...

The year from one's 29th birthday to one's 30th birthday is only 1/30 of one's life.

...

The year from one's 99th birthday to one's 100th birthday is just 1% of one's life.
Comcast turns on 50 mbps in San Francisco, Peninsula