skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Assuming the cost isn't too great, I hope BART will collaborate with these two to develop and benchmark some new interfaces. This prototype is a brilliant way of presenting the information.

And even though the time savings seems small, I always think of it multiplied across the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of tickets sold each year, and how much time is lost collectively. Making these mundane interactions even a little bit faster provides some huge benefits (in addition to reducing frustration).
Wasn't Spore designed by Will Wright? see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(game)

They are both amazing designers but, alas, are not the same person.
The BART kiosk interface is terrible. Not only do you have to look up the fare and transfer on a fucking spreadsheet posted on the wall, it doesn't actually tell you when to put the money in.

Simply putting giant text that says INSERT MONEY OR CREDIT/DEBIT CARD FIRST on the home screen would be a HUGE improvement.
Other: autodidact

Greater than any other "qualification...."

;)
Zombie computers 'on the rise'
FBI Probes Hacker's $10 Million Ransom Demand for Stolen Virginia Medical Records
So it's like Friendfeed?
I am saying it is possible to be exploitative even if you are a net increaser of wealth. I am saying that while it is a good thing to generate wealth, the good of generating wealth does not justify exploitation of labor, especially when the wealth that is generated does not go to the people who created that wealth.
Ha. Raising money is bad enough even when you do it above board. Thankfully it seems unlikely I'll have to again.
Python API for TV Show Data
Control Freaks: Hulu Now Blocks Anonymous Proxies Too
I'd say the main difference is emotional.

What does that mean exactly and why does it not apply to mathematicians?
Promotional bar accessories 
Promotional items like bar accessories are a great way to get the message out about your goods and services.
This is a subset of open-ended creativity. Another subset would be web 2.0 say and that rarely leads to "great and moving art".
Not sure - I think there may be 15-20 people? Lots of people said yes, but let's see how many show up. Free beers usually helps!
"The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours."

Still not too shabby.
As someone not familiar with the Boston area, I found I really missed having a "you are here" indicator when it came time to select my destination. I became disoriented and worried about traveling too far, even though I "knew" I was just playing with a web mockup.
Gas money and hotel rooms to lobby people? I dunno, I don't get it either.
Should have gone to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593729, my bad. I don't seem to be able to delete it, why?
... On the other hand, a lot of the appeal in such a life is in the fact there are still lots of unique mom and pop stores, often with generations of history, still in existence...
I've always wondered whether it was an intentional feature of the BART machines that they focus on the cash value on a card rather than the trip cost. Underpaying isn't allowed--the gates at your destination won't let you leave--and overpaying puts petty change into the BART's coffers when you forget about/lose/toss the card.
I probably should have toned that down a bit, yeah. What I meant was that when kickstarted, the concept will pretty easily attract new visitors, because it's a weird experience; and there's hardly a barrier to engage with the site (just click a button and off you go).

The problem is in the kickstarting: no people chatting, means no eavesdropping and barely anything of interest there when you visit.
Tried logging in... Twitter said somebody already used that token. Then it loaded a page with "OK, you've denied Tweetsip access to interact with your account!"

Something broken here...
I didn't know BART went all the way to Boston!
I've always thought that ebooks shouldn't cost more than 99cts. Perhaps 4.99 for a hot best seller like Harry Potter or something. But paying 10s, 20s or more is just ridiculous.

One word: GREED
Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581372
Rails3: Stepping off of the golden path
Well then, see you guys guys in 45min!
Interesting, perhaps a twitter oAuth issue? I'm using the stock version of the twitter-auth plugin http://github.com/mbleigh/twitter-auth/tree/master
Nate Silver: The End of Car Culture
"Kindle DX will be released this summer"

Amazon is just afraid of the incoming Apple iPad.

Very afraid...
Regarding your last point, you don't seem to have an email address in your profile.

Is this job on the east or west coast (or somewhere in between)?
Mobile phones can do both. Not all phones are connected to the internet all the time, so it would make sense to receive twitter messages using SMS, and then connect to the net.
Intel's Atom chip finding its way into servers
Maybe make an account that follows people you consider interesting (celebrities, web thinkers, etc.), and show the results for that user.
What would you have it return, null?

I wouldn't have it return anything. I'd have it throw an exception (type error). Dynamic typing can be a Good Thing. Pretending types don't exist is probably a mistake.

PHP uses the backslash for escaping characters in strings and for line continuation. There's ambiguity being created any way you look at it.

Many languages much older than PHP seem much more modern. Scheme, Smalltalk, Haskell, Python and even Perl come to mind.
This article doesn't make much sense. They hypothesize that effort increases in the playoffs, and to try to prove this, they find the statistic that changes the most between the playoffs and the regular season, and call that "effort."
I still really love the Manila/Radio Userland/Frontier platform for blogging and writing and still use the OPML editor (now under GPL) on the mac. There was an publish via email feature way back in 2001-02 as well as the whole EditThisPage idea. Of course Posterous is really cool too and has a ton more dev going into it now but I really like the idea of the OPML outliner and outliner software in general for writing and blogging however the masses don't seem to agree with me.
Mosso has a slick suite offering. There is great potential here.
I would ask the twitter api list about this http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
I clicked through about 20 slides without seeing more than a few words of text!
They didn't provide very much info on methodology here, which I suppose is acceptable for a lay article. Still, it makes it impossible to make any real use of this information. Did they compare statistics during the playoffs against aggregate statistics for the same teams over the entire year? Did they only use the middle 50% (or some other arbitrary portion) of the season, to remove early-season unfamiliarity and the effects of late-season "lame duck" teams? Did they only compare stats for games between teams that reached the playoffs (thus ensuring that they are at least vaguely similar caliber)? Did they discount elimination games, where of course the teams will be less worried about being tired and aching tomorrow, because there might not be a game tomorrow?

A better way to do a study like this would be to compare non-elimination games between the same two teams, in the playoffs and out. Unfortunately, you lose a large portion of your sample size when you eliminate variables in this way.

It would also be better to go the other way: do various regressions to figure out which stats tend to change in the playoffs, and then ask actual basketball players and coaches if it's plausible that those stats could be correlated with effort. It's not perfect, by any means, but it's better than picking some stats that we think should be correlated with effort and seeing if they change in the playofs.
Well, then you might argue that the entire book industry, especially the text book industry is motivated by greed.

For example, I was able to buy a technical book which retails for $49 on my Kindle for only $8. Not 99 cents, but it still saved me a lot of money.

http://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Methods-Scientific-Computing...
FWIW, I'm positive Jarre would be offended.
Amazon Mechanical Turk Best Practices
>>> artists obsess over their paint

Actually a lot of top artists don't. Not only because paint isn't their medium but because they don't do the work themselves. They have the ideas and then they employ minions to do the actually work of making the piece. Personally I think that makes them less than an artist, but they're the ones selling work for 100s of thousands of &pound;s

F'real.
It doesn't auto-rotate if you tilt it so the home button's at the top.
Presenting the "macros" of SFO/OAK (local airports) is a great idea. Unlike commuters, airport-goers are probably more episodic in their usage of the bart system, so they're looking to purchase a ticket of a specific value for that specific trip, instead of the "large value" ticket they will use over many days. They also may be less familiar with the route map and ticketing system, so more hand-holding is a good thing. And of course, these stops are among the most popular destinations.

Another disproportionately popular destination is whatever stop is adjacent to the current major sporting event. During a Warriors game, for example, you'll see the trains loaded with people wearing jerseys and team colors that all flood out at the Oakland Arena.

So, the addition of dynamic main-screen macros like

"Go to the Warriors Game"

.. based on some local events feed and present during the appropriate hours, would be slick...
PHP is like Basic for web development

Everybody knows about it, but nobody talks about it.
Oh you aren't the only one. I had the same moment of cognitive dissonance at Startup School last year. You get over it. ;)
I really like the idea. You need to work on icon display, though because some are huge:
http://pics.gd/2009-05-06_1608.png

and for long tweets, it's causing the lines to wrap oddly.

I think it makes sense to have the default page show the site in action (below a big "log in" banner). Perhaps displaying the top 100 Twitterers? http://wefollow.com/top
Make "high-speed replay" more speedy.
Having to watch for 30 lines for 3 minutes is a bit boring...
(or at least add on option to speed it up)

This is not going get you "critical mass", but it might help a bit.
Interesting. Did you make this after Fred Wilson asked for it a couple days ago?
Speaking of creativity - contact me to brainstorm a brand name, product name, slogan or even strategy to a certain extent. No fee charged - a HN special.
I already had a rough idea of that number. (Multiply the number of startups by 2.5 and you're close.)
I wouldn't be so hard on php for the mysql_* functions; they're wrappers around the C functions of the same names:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-escape-string.h...
Microsoft cultivated a culture of paranoia, I suppose that was about stomping little startups, and executing a "reach and extend" on the ones they couldn't do anything about.
Life in the deadpool
more interesting: what software did they use to make that chart?
>>> PHP attracts idiots. Partly that's because you don't need to know anything to make simple PHP.

Bit harsh. People are not idiots because they haven't studied computer science and don't know their algos from their elbows.

PHP is easy for quick and dirty - primarily business doesn't care how dirty the code is provided it's done quickly and the crashes don't hurt the bottom line too much.
Similarly, schizophrenia doesn't usually kick in until your early 20's for males, and early 30's for females, which leaves plenty of time for reproduction, especially in centuries past when we grew up faster.
"If there have been two seemingly immutable trends for the American consumer, they're that he's eaten more every year and driven more every year."

Ouch.
That's an interesting talk but high design takes time - that seems to be at odds with the workflow of newspapers.
The Look of a Winner
Nate Silver's rise to intellectual prominence is my favorite consequence of the 2008 election so far.
A Potential Breakthrough In Harnessing the Sun’s Energy
and i thought he would have been good at public speaking
Yehuda Katz on The Rise Of jQuery
Why didn't he just ask you in person?
Best practices for programming in C
uh, uh! A success story! I want to be like this guy. I bet if I do what he says I might actually come close.

But wait! We have different personalities...
> I'm proud of the fact that the US has led the world in per capita income the last few decades

Huh? Aren't they on par with countries like the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, etc?
I agree that a screenshot of some sort would be nice even if it is just generic links posted by celebrities and the such. Another interesting feature to implement if it isn't already (I don't use twitter so I can't really try this out) would be to use a similar system to digg/delicious/hackernews/reddit in showing how many people have posted a certain link (i.e. upvoted) or having the ability to sort by popularity of links
That IS a real issue, vs the (relatively) open nature of Java and the absolute openness of tomcat, apache? I personally think that open source tools are inherently superior because it of the additional eyes on the code reducing screwups and deliberately bad code. One very serious issue is that their anti-competitive acts make them opposed to standards (e.g. their work on the EcmaScript3 standard and what would have been a great harmonization of AS4 and JS2!) and it's better to work with standards for obvious reasons... Being involved with open source, standards compliant tools gives you an awful lot of advantages.
How a Student-Friendly Kindle Could Change the Textbook Market
Fear and Loathing - The Gonzo Papers
Who wants to be bet that if they paid him the ransom, he'd turn around and sell them on the black market anyway? "Men in masks cannot be trusted".
Yes - that's true.

But it also gives you additional information: how to check if the cost can be ignored and whether it will be lost in the noise. And that's important, because in serious VMs you can often control the GC parameters. That means you cam make sure that those asymptotes are as close to reality as possible for your exact problem.

It's the same story for hashed collections. You can find big O costs for their operations, but they're amortised costs. Sure - once in a while you have to realloc / rehash / copy the table depending on the implementation - but then you know how to judge if that collection is ok for you. You can modify the starting size exactly in order to lose the rare cost in the noise. The trick is knowing the limits.

Yet somehow many people who love hashmaps hate GC...

You're right about what the paper says, it just didn't spell out the reason why that info is useful ;)
Because that's exactly what it is! I remember PHP when it was PHP/FI, "personal home page form interpreter".
Hulu agrees international TV deals
I'm not a fan of outliner software personally, but I do keep yelling at them* to support Markdown or Textile so I can compose and send my e-mails straight from vim. One of the beautiful things about Posterous is that it is basically just... email! So if a standard syntax like textile or markdown were supported, you could write it in whatever you want. In your case, you could write it in OPML, write a script to convert it to textile/markdown, then pipe it to sendmail. Done!

* "them" being Garry, because everything is really his fault. Sachin is a good guy.
The site seems not to recognize URLs that use IDN and/or unicode (e.g. http://✿.ws/beauty )

Here's a list of lots of Twitters users using some of them from our service, tinyarro.ws:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%E2%9E%A8.ws+OR+%E2%9E%AF...
Just think of him as a comedy aggregator, something like a real life Digg/Reddit/etc. :)
If onling gaming is growing so fast, why are the companies not valued more highly?
I don't see any compelling reason to switch off of Java for the VS stack... maybe if I end up needing to do consulting, I will learn these. I'd probably have to buy a windows license first :( One point I'd like to make is that eclipse is based on an open standard (OSGi) and having worked at a company that features an eclipse plugin, having the eclipse code open source is damn useful.
Better add the cost of a replacement policy to that total.
> Most mathematicians would probably not do very well in the open-ended creativity of writing a novel

Lewis Carroll
Bringing Traffic with Google Adwords
I liked the whole thing actually.
Upmodded for being a clever putdown. Still a putdown though...
That wasn't a publicity stunt. I just discovered I didn't like blogging. I'd rather write things that take more time.

This new blog is different. This is for YC. For YC we often have little things we want to say.

Incidentally, I doubt Sergey Brin's blog was a publicity stunt either. He probably just had second thoughts after his first post attracted so much attention.
I'd like to see someone make an international model of such a site and gain a large backing with some popular tv show or movie content providers and beat hulu at their own game.

It would be interesting to see how their revenue model changes.
Of course, it's open source, so it's not like
we can decree this or anything

He is employed by RedHat, so they're implicitly making the decision his working style is worth it.

But this is an example of open source at work -- people forked GLIBC due to, in part, dissatisfaction with Depper's (or Redhat's) working style and priorities.
Yeah, it was pretty good. I only noticed a few things I'd change.
Sort numbers faster than glibc qsort()
In which a number of sorting strategies are combined to minimize sort time of C numerical types.
What did people expect? The existing small Kindle costs $360. Large-screen ebook readers from other companies cost even more than the Kindle DX. How exactly did anyone expect that Amazon would get a larger e-ink display without raising the price?
We're in the deepest recession in half a century, and people are cutting back, and from ONE DATAPOINT, effectively, we're supposed to believe that it's the "end of the car culture" ?

> To sort this out, I built a regression model that accounts for both gas prices and the unemployment rate in a given month and attempts to predict from this data how much the typical American will drive.

Note that this model is tuned using 15 years of data, and yet we're in a mini Black Swan event that happens every 50 or 100 years.

OF COURSE there's divergence of reality and model.

I'm amazed that anyone can take this seriously.
Firefox at 270 million users
It's still only a plan. They are collecting opinions from the community right now. :)

For the record, BART = Bay Area Rapid Transit and covers San Francisco and neighboring towns. MBTA is the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority and covers Greater Boston subway and buses, as well as commuter rail throughout the state.
JCrawler and http_load: Super Easy Stress Testers
Copyright and patent is an anachronism. It needs to go.

This is not the mere opinion of a generation. It is also the opinion of neoclassical economists like David Levine, free market anarchists, patent lawyers like Stephen Kinsella, etc. The intellectual framework is already laid down.

The Pirate Party is actually moderate in comparsion to those abolisionists but what they proposes will effectively negate the power of copyright forever. From there it is a matter of abolishment of an entire system.
As pg has said, "There is a great shortage at the high end. I know a bunch of startups that are desperate to hire really good programmers."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133360 (specific comment)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133331 (full thread)
illustrator or equivalent, most likely. most infographics are custom in publications of that size.
Blue Frog Gaming
I have a bunch of servers with Amazon, a few with GoGrid and a couple personal ones with SliceHost(probably going to be switching to Linode soon).

Amazon + Scalr is by far my favourite.
Saving up for the 2010 race, I think.
But that's irrelevant once your identity is stolen.
Mm, works nicely for me at 1280 x 1024 a monitor. Also quite reasonable-looking printed.
Meat Cards: Business Cards Made from Beef Jerky (+ Laser)
Instead he turns out to be great at it.
It seems that news.yc comments take even less time than a blog post. How are they different?
This should be fixed now, try a Shift+refresh to update CSS
It's the MS Windows of programming. Everybody uses it, nobody brags about it.
I know 3d charts are nifty, but a 2d chart would have been more legible -- http://graphjam.com/2008/11/13/song-chart-memes-perception-o....
> I learned way too much from this experience to explain here.

Too bad ... that's what I want to read about!
This article is about age discrimination in high technology. It suggests a number of reasons for it not the least of which is foreign immigration under the flawed H1B program. Other causes are that young people promote it and try to justify it with all the the above arguments. Each of you are complicit in this and will, in time, fall victim to it.

What did you figure you'd do when you turn 35?
In modern German, Lebensraum is still a perfectly normal word when used as "the place where animals live". But we are very cautious about our history and the history of words.

Sometimes bordering on (self-) censorship. So that caution is not necessarily a good thing.
CSS Short Hands
There is an international model and it doesn't make much money.
That's pretty lame.
I moved to Boulder, CO on Saturday. In good part because I hate driving. It's hard to really grasp how much more enjoyable it makes life until you experience it. It's not just being car-free though, but the community that follows.

I lived in NYC for awhile and while it's car-free it's still pretty awful. You still have the same 30 minute commute -- there is no sense of geographic community. Unless you just refuse to make friends with people outside your neighborhood, every time you go out you're gonna end up on the train for who knows how long and-- oh wait, the cross-town is out of service and the train doesn't stop after 2am at blah blah blah. The stress level is easily on par with rush hour gridlock.
>There are some lazy and irresponsible journalists out there.

It's just the nature of the beast these days. With the revenue slowly disappearing, journalists have to provide cheaper articles. That's why almost every news article is a recycled press release or, like this case, poorly researched.

It's quite sad IMHO; if news is delivered online, there will be a massive dilution of revenue. There may never again be enough money in journalism to do extensively researched articles. Short of people doing it out of the good of their own hearts. Time will tell I guess.
Last time I checked, this was against appengine terms of service, has that changed?
Ning opens up more to developers
"Young Madison spends a typical day visiting with friends and family; follow along to see how she is learning ever step of the way! This book invites readers to explore the world of learning through the eyes of a child. Find out how children learn in a variety of different ways as they explore all that is around them. Discover how learning can occur while baking cookies or while jumping rope with friends."

Looks like numerical methods are easier than I expected!
The limits on opening hours for German shops have mostly been lifted in the last years.

Aldi enables 50 Cent beer and 2 Euro wine. Their drive hard bargains with their supplieres. Interestingly Aldi pays their employees quite well and seems to occupy a higher moral ground in the German opinion than Walmart does in America. (Lidl, the second big discounter chain, has a reputation for mis-treating employees, though.)