skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They occur a lot more than they used to, and they don't get modded down as much as they should. The signal-to-noise ratio here is going down pretty quickly.
What? Don't get me wrong, I'm as big a Lisp fan as any, but everything done in the video has nothing to do with what makes Lisp uniquene - macros. Any language with a repl would do here as well.
On the one hand, there may be a legitimate argument to be made that the wireless networks just don't have the bandwidth to allow users to use whatever kinds of data-heavy applications they want. On the other hand, that could be solved without violating the Broadband Policy Statement by throttling heavy users' connections.
it has nothing to do with hacking & hackers, it's very oldschool.

however: " As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful."
Review: Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture by Alan Sokal
Didn't Apache use regular expresions for mod_rewrite?
The problem is when you've already sold to your entire market (or close 'nuff). How do you keep getting revenue? Upgrades.

When everyone's happy, and you don't want to rock the boat with improving existing functionality (or if you don't know how), you have to add new features.
Borussia Dortmund - Koln online match
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I'm using SVD in building a porn recommendation engine. (Very NSFW, and the recommendation engine itself isn't live yet: http://fapseek.com)
I don't get it (at all). Can you elaborate?
Yes, but I've never heard of RewriteConds/Rules affecting scalability. It's common knowledge to only use preg_match, etc. in PHP if you're performing a very complex search. Of course, this is not a huge deal, but I feel that if you're advising others to use such a simple piece of code, it should be as perfect as possible.
Google Social Web Blog: Recent developments from around the social web
For us, definitely.
For the media, a necessity.
The parallel with IE6 goes further than you might have expected. The Digg folks have managed to screw up the page rendering in at least one non-IE browser.
Maybe you encountered some numerical instability in SVDLIBC, but I would guess that there probably was a bug in the parameters you passed to SVDLIBC. Might want to try it again with a smaller matrix and compare it against MATLAB or something to flush out any bugs.
Maybe I'm just fueling the hype by debunking it, but the places shown in the video have no correlation to the map that is claimed. A lot are shot in picturesque places like Ocean Beach or the Presidio which are very far away from the map shown at the end. Even some of the relatively obscure places I recognized are not even close (there's a "Trad'r Sam" which is on Geary, way northwest of even the top left corner of their "R").

Edit: oh duh, I get it now. That's even part of the joke. http://services.google.com/latitudevideo/
Microsoft's Lame New Anti-Apple Ad: Macs Are For Kids
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"Reading for extended periods of time on a device such as the Crunchpad, iPhone, LCD, etc., is torture."

Your sentence ended too early. You forgot the "for me".

I used to read Project Gutenberg ebooks on my Palm Pilot... the Palm Pilot 2. That's a monochrome (effectively) 160x160 screen. I was fine. There's a lot of us who don't mind so much.

(I know studies show reading speed drops, but I wonder if it might pick up again if you tested someone using a display like that long enough to get used to it. At any rate, I sure didn't feel slowed down, which is the important thing.)

I'd buy this over a Kindle in a heartbeat, though I'm still not going to give up my laptop keyboard so I'm not in the market at all. (But I'm even more not in the market for a Kindle.)
The Sokal hoax

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

was an interesting hack of academic publishing.
I'd be interested in trying it out, can you send it my way a la sbuss a cise d ufl d edu

Cheers
By the way, I've always been looking for a good introduction to d&d. Do you know a good computer game for beginners ?
Massachusetts Bill to Ban Non-Competes backed by Spark Capital
Yes, sometimes one specific feature can make or break a product - even if it is seldom used by a minority of it's users. For example some use cases for Acrobat / PDF rely on scripting ability (JS), but the vast majority of PDFs come without embedded scripts.
Using rails and Facebooker we released our first app I think in something like 2 days. We went from 0 platform experience and an idea to a simple but functional app (that grew like crazy, but unfortunately had only 2 weeks to sign up new members) in probably under 20 developer hours. Our following app (the one that is doing fairly well today) took something like 1 developer month to launch, though we've since put probably put 1 developer year into improving it, generalizing the engine and launching two new themes on top of it, as well as porting the whole thing to Myspace. We'll be releasing game #4 onto both networks this week.

We didn't have to worry about being accepted into any store. (Facebook has an app directory that takes a couple days to get reviewed for, but honestly there's very little benefit to even being in it.) After we launched, upgrading was as simple as any website. We didn't have to make some fairly hard to achieve top 25 list to get traffic, in fact, we're hoping for the reverse.

Developing for Facebook isn't that different than any other web development (in fact a lot of apps run in an iframe). It's far easier, and gives far less control to a third party. It's far more lucrative, doesn't have the "hit or miss" aspect of the app store.

You're right about the hosting cost. Only some iPhone apps need that, many do not. All Facebook/Myspace ones do. But the greater monetization potential more than makes up for it if you're doing games (I'm not so sure about other types of apps). eCPMs on offer pages are measured in the $100s. Many people I know (in a way that would be admissible in court) are pulling in north of $500. Even if that only amounts to 1% of your traffic, that's still ludicrously high, especially on the volume you can get very quickly.

The only way in which it is inferior is it isn't sexy and nobody is going to write lots of articles about you. The iShoot guy got more coverage in bigger media outlets for bringing in $600k than Zynga did for making $40-$50m last year.
Venture Capital Crash Course [video]
This is fantastic; I always love seeing people respond to other people's comments - the clarity of thinking by having to hear what other people say is really helpful.
It may be open-ended, and sphinxlike may be a matter of judgment, but for what it is, that is not a vague article.
Even Apple's failures managed to gain a small, rabid fanbase behind them. Possible exception being the HiFi.
It's about a month old at this point, but I didn't find it posted on YC previously. (With that said, I'm sure everyone follows "Ask the VC" anyway.)

It's definitely worth spending the hour and a half watching the video. Lots of interesting and useful stuff. Not boring either.
Do I want to use Emacs with a pen?
And it is not banal.
To what degree banning non-competes will fuel the tech scene in Massachusetts is tough to say - obviously there are a lot of other variables separating it from Silicon Valley - but it's nice to see that Spark is practicing what it preaches, having stopped requiring non-competes in 2007.
I like Baldurs Gate and Neverwinter Nights. Not exactly new games, but still one of the best PC RPGs. Fallout is also great, but doesn't use the DnD system.
"Solving the right problem" is like the skill of "big picture thinking". It's clearly important, but the evaluation of it is subjective and case-based. What's nice about this tool is that it's relatively objective, for the most part, although it certainly doesn't paint a complete picture of what makes a good programmer (which is context-driven, in any case).
My feeling is that the numbers are skewed because of the bias in the people choosing to report their relationship status. For the countries with a low number of reported single people, perhaps there is some stigma attached to being single?
Microsoft pays for inaccurate "Apple Tax" study, issues 3rd TV ad
I'm less interested in any sort of platform war related to this story, and more concerned about the tactics being used. Is it just me or do these sort of stunts smell like they're a decade old or more? I just don't see how this works in Microsoft's favor.
The latest official ECMAScript standard is ECMAScript 3rd edition from 1999. Since then there have been several attempts to create an upgrade, known as ECMAScript 4. For example ActionScript 3 and Microsofts JScript.Net is actually based on an abandoned ECMAScript 4 proposal from around 2000-2003, a spec that way heavily influenced by Java. A new ECMAScript 4 effort started a few years ago with Brendan Eich as editor, which was more inspired by dynamic and functional languages.

However the new ECMAScript 4 spec was pretty large and ambitious, and some parts of the working groups called for a lesser, incremental spec release to fix some of the most needed fixes. This proposal was called ECMASCript 3.1. Then it was decided to scale the ambitious ECMAScript 4 spec back, and this scaled back version (which is still in flux) is called ECMAScript Harmony.

Now ECMAScript 3.1 has been released, but they have decided to give it the official name ECMAScript 5th edition, thereby leapfrogging the 4th edition! This might be because "ECMAScript 4" have gotten a bad name because of the several failed attempts. Also, it is obviously confusing when widely different specs gets the same name.

Harmony will then probably be 6th edition, and if some of the features from ES4 which was culled from Harmony appears in a later spec, it might be in 7th edition!
I believe the axiom is that most users only use 20% of the features of any given piece of software. The counter-axiom is that it's a different 20% for each user. I don't believe there's any actively managed software out there with features not used by a single user.
Ask HN: Review my webapp: hapylink.com
Yeah I'm familiar with the history as well, I was just saying that I think those other sites were not conscious of the need to set a good example for newcomers, and HN mostly is. We have had these self-examination threads almost monthly since we first appeared on TC.

I think setting a good example will cause people to rise to it, and I think being conscious of setting a good example means we will preserve our community values. No one on Reddit or Digg was clamoring to "maintain the level of discourse"... their '4chanization' happened because those communities had no immune response. Here, we have a powerful social response, in that most people set a good example and gently correct those that don't.
These guys should publish something like "The 12 Laws of Marketing Books." But then they would be giving away all of their secrets.
Conficker: The neverending story
These remind me of Doug Hofstadter's "Parquet Deformations" in metamagical themas. Good stuff.
Unless page load times are affecting your browsing experience, why bother optimizing when a regular expression is so clear and simple.
It seems very common that certain customer requirements -- we call them "checklist features" -- won't ever be used.

So when I'm deriving specifications, I always pay special attention to separating out the real needs and expectations from the checklist stuff. If you can do that well, then you can minimize the resources invested in the latter.

But for whatever reason, those items are still on their list, and we can't just omit them.

The trick is identifying which they are, and finding the minimum specification that allows it to be checked off the list.
Yeah, you're essentially trading lower cost of living for the network effect when you don't live in a hub for what you're trying to do. The interwebs make it a little easier to catch up, but you're still playing catch up.
Implantable Eye Telescope Brings Sight Back To The Blind
the link at the bottom is also interesting
http://amasci.com/emotor/kelvin.html

esp. this bit see WEIRDNESS: really really gigantic generators
"I don't believe there's any actively managed software out there with features not used by a single user."

I've seen it first hand. I've worked on a commodities app that had a way of turning deals into general patterns, which could be saved and used to quickly instantiate new deals following the same pattern. It was a sophisticated and highly capable subsystem. What do the users do instead? Copy-Paste-Edit! And that's just one example. That app has literally dozens of non-trivial features that have not been used in over a decade of production use. On more than one occasion, we had discussions like: "We'll have to code up a data migration for that change, oh wait, that table is empty!"
How to Answer Interview Questions
Harmony is the code name for the version after this one.
The Sun Also Sets
First, I'm a big fan of your flagship product. I use it on my site and told most of the Upper East Side about the joy Cornify has brought into my life.

Second, can I get some account information - say, analytics when I create an account with happylink?

If I'm going to be spreading happiness, I want to measure it.
It's also kind of sad that that's novel...

The heat map is good, too.
An open secret in the telecom industry (my old gig) is that MI5 will make the first company which can reliably intercept Skype communications very very wealthy.

My (non-technical) CEO asked me personally one day (I was the resident SIP ninja) if I thought it feasible.

Good times...
Maybe. If so, the Noahpad (also famous for its Engrish ad copy read by a Stephen Fry-like British voice) would be infringing, as it uses its dual trackpads in a similar fashion.
I would love to see what the folks at Harmonix think about this. If it passed, they'd probably be decimated by publishers grabbing teams of three to work on various rhythm games.

That said, I'm fully in support. :)
Thanks e1ven - don't worry I don't scare that easily :-)

I don't know whether this helps at all, but I "read" HN for months through the RSS feed - so in a way I was not on HN at all, if HN is defined by reading the commentary and/or upvoting. But it was enough to give the vibe of the site, by the nature of the stories posted. Eventually I read something where I thought something like "Does whoever submitted this actually believe this ?!" and came back here to see the comments. I was pleasantly surprised by the S/N, so either it was not the kind of thread that was worrying you or you guys must have been intellectual saints before all the plebs showed up :-)

The point is that whether you realise this or not there are already two tiers of access to HN (full site and read-only). So you could chose to enforce some kind of social pressure on commentators (either through real identity or as another person has said through an invite system - I have seen the latter work well in other contexts) while still not turning HN into a private Y-combinator club.

It comes down to as to whether you folks feel that the essence of HN lies in the story selection or the commentary.
Obviously I don't have an opinion on that.
Generally it's "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
> Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching lunatics

I think this applies more to Rails. I've found the Ruby community outside of Rails to be quite sane people.
Wow, your first startup looks like something that might interests me.

Even though I never played D&D, I definitely appreciate the creators for the great contribution they made to the genre.
Computer games aren't the way to go. If you've played any computer RPG in the last 20 years, you've gotten an introduction and you're ready to take the leap.

Buy the latest Players Handbook, read it for a while, then put together a short adventure for 2-3 friends. Don't worry, it's not hard, and there is no wrong way to do it.
Everyone knows that you cannot measure happiness.
DDJ: Research May Lead to Chip Manufacturing Changes
I didn't get a job at a startup in MA because they feared my last company's non-compete.
Sign up for free :)

Then get a premium account and send me your delicious money!
I dislike the government asserting that I am not a fully competent adult, capable of making my own decisions about what agreements I enter into and which I do not.

If I'm not competent to read a non-compete and agree, or not agree, to it, then why do they think that I'm competent to drive a car, or vote, or sign a lease?
Economists do; they like to call it 'utility'
Pretty cool but your target audience - current or former drug users - is going to be a difficult one to monetize.
Hilarious. I love it.
I hadn't considered the difference between just reading site site, and actively commenting- Admittedly, I myself don't comment as much as I ought to.

I certainly don't want to turn HN in a Y-combinator club- They rejected my application almost 2 year ago, after all ;)

"It comes down to as to whether you folks feel that the essence of HN lies in the story selection or the commentary."

I think this is the point PG and I disagree on a bit- His approach is to focus on moderation of the stories, and increasing their focus, where as I'm more concerned with the tone and caliber of discussion.

It's his site, so he gets to win that one ;) Hopefully community pressure can help to keep things inline- Past experience suggests that doing more is likely necessary.

I've offered my proposal for comments and had it rejected, but hopefully the discussion may help him (and us, collectively) find a solution that works better.
Crash course in venture capital [video]
I saw this talk in person; the argument he made was that many kinds of chips (basically everything except high-end processors, DRAM, and NAND) don't want to move to 22nm fabs because they're so expensive. And since the demand for cutting-edge fabs is dropping, the price is increasing even more.
I'm 53 and currently trying to run a small (non-software but high-tech) startup. I may be going back to Oracle programming soon. Does anyone know how much resistance there is to hiring middle-aged guys out there? It's been about 10 years since I've looked.
Slightly lame but FAR better than anything they've been running recently.
Ask HN: Are you an active or reactive leaner?
Recently I have this bloated piece of code that's giving me a lot of problems so I decided to investigate design patterns more closely. I've heard a lot about design patterns, I read the Design Patterns book, I even wrote a 10-page paper about it. But for some reasons, I couldn't wrap my mind to understand what each pattern is and how they work. Now, with a specific problem at hand I was able to read and understand a lot of patterns, up until I found the one to my problem. This is how I found out I'm a reactive learner (I'm not sure if I'm using the right word).

I always know there's something inefficient about the way I learn. I'd sit in class not trying to learn anything when the professor talk about theorems and proofs. And then when he moves on to the examples, I would instantly get it. I found my mind more stimulated to learn if I know the concept is useful to a known practical problem. It seems that my brain deliberately procrastinates and defers learning new abstract concepts. But this mode of learning wastes a lot of time.

I'm just wondering what percentage of other hackers are like me? Is it nature or nurture? I'd say it's probably mostly nurture as I spent the earlier half of my life in an education system where students are practically spoon-fed. I'm always amazed at others' ability to instantly grasp abstract concepts. What can I do to be more active when learning new abstract concepts?
This is why economists are so over-utilised yet never happy.
Minor tweak:
When clicking the input box, I'd like the ghost text, 'http://', to be removed. Since I've already copied the URL I want to make happy, when I paste it I produce: http://http://urltomakehappy.com, It'd be nice to not have to manually remove that first http://
I’m always amazed by people who spend time doing this kind of application. I wish I had that spare time.
The Newton wasn't a failure. The first version sucked, but afterwards the handwriting recognition was spot on.

And do you know what the final newton designed by Apple turned into? The Palm Pilot.
well

a) I registered the domain about 6 months before Techcrunch started calling the thing crunchpad, so they don't really have any claim to the name. In fact it wasn't them who came up with the name itself in the first place, it was one of the comments.

b) Plenty of companies make the same mistake of failing to register a domain name. If Apple didn't sue over something like iPhone and Dell over Adamo, I doubt there is much of a leg to stand on. + There is no trademark yet for crunchpad

Funnily enough, that story was posted on Techcrunch only a few weeks ago:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/28/dell-belatedly-buys-ada...

c) I don't really plan to bend Arrington over the barrel on this. But I think it'll play better if he contacts me, instead of me just emailing out of the blue offering the domain. Since we all know how unlikely it is to get a response from Techcrunch
Pro Apple infestation of HN in 3 ... 2 .... 1 ...

Seriously, when two spouses bicker, is it ever news worthy ??
Digging For The 'Prime' Jewels Of Numbers (Mersenne primes)
There's nothing more tragic than someone who disagrees with you.

Let's say I lost all my karma. What is the real loss for me anyway?
Oh, hell-- I've got some karma to spare...

I could do this with a table in about 11 seconds.
Cameras With Time-Machine Powers
Thanks for the tip! I'll spend some time reading on what those both provide; I think that once I'm writing code and watching it perform I'll have to motivation to pull myself over the other hurdles.
Apple > Microsoft

(I have Karma to burn, eat your hearts out :))
Classic Mistakes in Software Development
DUH! I'll get it fixed.
Do I get a bag of holding with my premium account?
Ah yes, that rings a bell—thanks for the thorough refresher!
There is nothing wrong with your code, it's just that nobody else does it that way. Personally, I find code easier to read when it looks something like what I expect... but OTOH, it's very obvious what your code does too.
JustHearIt.com - Music from anywhere on the web
I don't think so. Not all pressure sensitive touchscreens are created equal. Wacom pays particular attention to details, and there will always be a high-end market for quality tools. (Otherwise, Apple wouldn't still exist, much less the "high end" of Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc...)

In particular, artists can be quite finicky.
Digg did a blog post yesterday explaining all the steps they took to give the page juice to the content and not to their URL, so it shouldn't hurt the content-site's SEO (using rel=canonical, et cetera).

http://blog.digg.com/?p=636
Plenty of people have enough spare time to do something fun like this. It's called having a hobby.
Content Delivery Networks reduce latency.
Debate: Should the rich pay higher taxes?
I saw a Wacom Cintiq the other day in use. Wow. If you have $2k, it's better than pen and paper

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22i+love+my+wacom+...
New method could lead to narrower chip patterns
Do not outshine the master? Yeah, hiding your talent is a sure way to get people to recognize your talent, and thereby attain success. I stopped reading at #1.
All they are doing is giving the Mac credit as a real competitor to Windows.
Ageism is still absolutely rampant in the industry.
Cornify is kinda fun... what is the point of Happylink?