skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I said that because, at that point, I realized we had a difference of definition, and I didn't know which one was more common. Having looked at it, I think what I say is the accepted definition - regardless of the origin.

But. All of this is a digression. The entire reason I said I don't think this is bikeshedding is because I think there's value in discussing why join is a member of strings and not sequences in Python. Understanding this point helps in understanding Python's design.
How about create a method called detectSum that accepts a block as an argument. The block will return the specific field to use when summing.

This lets you skip subclassing.
You don't have to renumber lists in Markdown; it numbers them independently anyways.
I am not talking about innovation. I am just saying that you dont need a framework for two column layout.
Did you assign points to bugs and chores, as well? Just curious, because Pivotal suggests not to count bugs towards the velocity of the project, because bugs are not directly bringing business value... Just curious about your approach.
You made a good point, I saw increase in direct acesses but I need to find some ways to know that my effort spent on twitter produces that. Maybe url shortener like bit.ly can help in that regards.
Who talks about cutting edge? The simpler you design is, the more overhead you get from using a framework.
Well you have to admit its kind of a shit situation, that this benevolent 3rd party has to step up to bring C# to the world outside of Microsoft. Imagine if Sun never released Java for anything other than Solaris. Linux in the server room is serious business. It's like some pathetic highschool drama that Microsoft ignores it, like Linux used to date Microsoft's girlfriend and now Microsoft ignores Linux. Yeah sure its a business strategy whatever, but it sucks for everyone involved. If it were anyone other than Microsoft, this snubbing would be highly unprofessional. I want to choose a language/framework based on its quality, not on some bullshit market maneuvering.
You mean using YouTube and Twitter logos? IANAL, but it's not attempting to misrepresent the brands so it should be ok.

It is a bit '90s to have your own toolbar though.
Yelp to let businesses comment publicly on reviews
What are you looking for? Let me know and I'll do what I can.
Failing car brakes do not endanger society, either, so we can leave that aside.

Are you sure? What's the effect on society if I drive by your kids' school at 3pm with faulty brakes?
Joe Pruitt,

You must LOVE F5 products as the only links you submit are links to the F5 site. Perhaps you can at least try to pretend you're not shilling for F5 and submit at least one tiny little link to a page that doesn't have anything to do with F5 and yet will still appeal to the readers of this site? :-)
Apparently Oscar Wilde said that.

I thought puns were the lowest form of wit.

I also just read that wit is the highest form of sarcasm. Does that make puns a high form of sarcasm?
There is a lot to be learned from a lot of "MBA" professors including Drucker, Christensen, Pfeffer, Ackoff, and more. And there are a lot of great graduates of MBA programs.

But the MBA programs have already de-valued themselves into the garbage can. The burden is on MBA programs to prove that they are valuable as these blogs, not the other way around.
American financial wizardry is all about forgetting steps.
I find it really amusing that this has degenerated into a debate over the meaning of bikeshedding. Talk about bikeshedding!
You'll have to explain what you mean by "overhead" in this context. Time to build? Bandwidth? If the former, certainly wrong. If the latter, whether it's meaningful overhead depends on the framework.

Also, unpack "simple".
Hi, I hope that you received an alpha email. If not, please send me an email at Russpd@gmail.com and I can send you an alpha invite to your email address.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts, sorry for not making the sign in process more clear.
TechCrunch would never respect a company asking them to take down leaked photos... and these weren't leaked, they were published publicly. By which I mean: Can someone who has local copies of these put them up somewhere? (Dustin?)

I'd be interested to see them.

Also, not sure what the netbook comment in the post really means. It was pretty evident how big netbooks were going to be after the first Eee PC went for sale, which was late 2007. But that doesn't really matter, since Arrington's tablet isn't really anything like a netbook (at least, not as they're traditionally defined now).

We're going to start to see a lot of cheap, touchscreen tablet PCs running Linux and Android (and maybe Windows 7), though, over the next couple of years.
I think the difference is that women usually pay a business a small fee for the glass tube, whereas they pay an individual handsomely for the meat tube (in my case) or get it for free (in the case of normal people).

if you get the meat tube for free, it's subject to social rules, whereas if you get the glass tube for cash, it's subject to business rules. social rules say that if the meat tube is full of inferior juice, too bad. business rules say that if the meat tube baby juice isn't up to par, you get your money back.

the other interesting phenomenon here: men will pay for sex without responsibilities, while women will pay to get pregnant without having sex. it's almost a continuum. at one end you have responsibilities, at the other end you have sex, and there's a clear difference in who buys what.
There are huge privacy implications to that sort of thing, and very likely several laws or risks of serious liability that make it a thoroughly unappetizing business plan.
For testing:

http://tusul.net/dlkbdE -> http://news.ycombinator.com

Stats:

http://tusul.net/stats/dlkbdE
Mono team, please stop.

You don't even support all of .NET 1.1 yet. Why could any of you possibly think it's a good idea to add your own features to C#???

Look, your job is to make .NET run under Linux. I know you think you're something more special than that, but you're not. This is just yak shaving, and it needs to stop. All you're going to accomplish by doing this is further piss off us developers who just want to port their stuff to another OS without it crashing.
I rate three across the board, which simply implies to me that the author of the chart had similar interests and focus.
Also just have in big fonts sign up under the forms to create username and password that should be right on the frontpage.

If username is not available generate under form in big letters username taken please try a different username. Same with password instructions and or warnings.

good luck!
The A.P. Apologizes, Admits To A “Misunderstanding Of YouTube Usage”
This would be more readable on a single page. I am very frusturated by the nested layout.
A part of me wants to keep it going just for the irony value.
It's a good idea - but I am surprised it is not marketed for little kids too. I have the reverse problem - the grandparents (who get by on gmail) are demanding that my 2 year old (!) have her own email address to send her pictures and so on (she can't read!). Right now I am fobbing them off with an alias that forwards to my own email so I can screen it, but I can see that a service like this would work really well for that. There are some services geared to "kid e-mail", so I don't think it is a bad idea to target seniors as a first step, but this seems to me to also be an excellent solution to the kid problem. Kids don't need anywhere the eye candy that gets thrown at them - they just need clear consistent workflow.
I've done exactly this for the last few years. I have a bunch of text files with likes like

# 3rd (of march)
mail 2.23 mailing for bookmooch
lunch 6.04 soup and sandwich @ riverfront cafe
espresso 1.29

# 4th
groc 29.57 groc run

etc. I was previously totaling it with a short Python script, but now I'm using a tiny awk script (it's exactly the sort of thing it was designed for). Either way, it's incredibly easy to parse simple text files like that, dump the results out to gnuplot, etc. Just plugging in receipts once every week or two doesn't take very long.
Is Twitter overhyped?
Wow, the pictures are already taken off.
GitHub also hosts private repositories: http://github.com/plans
I disagree. There's a large number of microsoft products that I would gladly use over the alternatives.

C#? I'd much rather use C# over java.

Office? What's the alternative there?
Open Office? Come on Open Office is far buggier, less user friendly, less productive, and has far less features.
Google Docs? Missing tons of features, not to mention it's utterly useless when I don't have a network connection.

Visual Studio? Again nothing comes close to the features, speed, and stability. Eclipse is the nearest competitor imo - and it's still trailing behind a long ways.
The simple way of how to cook tilapia
It is nicely designed. Here is what it looks like:

http://zee.posterous.com/did-arrington-actually-pull-off-the...
Fluff.

Can someone explain why we're taking business advice from a college kid who's working on an embryonic startup, and other than that has only worked in internships? The red flag here is that the post does not relate any relevant business experiences and has a linkbait title. Here are some others that exhibit identical traits:

* http://jessicamah.com/blog/?p=641

* http://jessicamah.com/blog/?p=560

* http://jessicamah.com/blog/?p=417

* http://jessicamah.com/blog/?p=406

My personal favorite: http://jessicamah.com/blog/?p=372

Hiring advice from someone who's never hired!

Maybe instead of spending time burning the midnight oil for my small business, I should post linkbait and get the red carpet treatment like this "entrepreneur" has.

Edit: It's also pretty lame to submit your own blog posts.
If you build a web app you must test it on IE, WM is the third biggest mobile OS for smartphones, and that's before desktops.

Sorry PG I can't agree with you on this account.
Integral Calculus in Lambda Calculus (Lisp)
when you're an outlier because you spend an inordinate amount of time among people creating new technology, then your anomalous experience makes you better at predicting the future, not worse.

Sometimes, but not always. If you spent all your time hanging out with people creating new technology in the mid 1980s, you might have been convinced that Lisp machines would soon become the dominant computing platform.
djbdns id from Dan Bernstein - http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html

No, I didn't do any measurements other than subjective observations. This was on my LAN and using BIND9 I would see noticeable delays between the 'looking up' and 'connecting to' messages in firefox. After switching to djbdns you hardly have time to read the 'looking up' before it starts the connection.
One thing I found interesting was that he straight out said 'you can't make money on iTunes'
Del.icio.us finally gets some respect from Yahoo, exposes data through BOSS
A bit harsh. I don't think this is deliberate linkbait (or rather votebait); I think it's mostly youthful exuberance. And she does have a point, even though she doesn't have a lot of data to back it up.
Puns may be bad, but poems are verse.
I didn't try to use the application itself, but this site is not targeted to the elderly. It's targeted to the family members of an elderly person. If an elderly person is reading this page, they probably don't need to use the application.

Now, the application itself should probably use big fonts.
The best way to have something named after yourself is to go with a really generic name (such as "automatic machine.") Then, people discussing your idea will often attach your name to it so that they can discuss it unambiguously. That's why they call it a Turing Machine, although Turing himself never did.
The problem with "asking for the brutal truth" is that no one knows what it is.

At least in terms new markets and new products, you are facing the unknown. You can't work it out in your head; you can't find the right person to tell you if it's right or it's wrong. You just have to try it.

Don't be fooled when confident VCs and angels act like they know; they don't. They're just guessing (that's their job).

Far better to encourage an experimental approach: to be encouraged to try things and to be encouraged when it doesn't work. Because courage is what you need to face the unknown.

It is useful to be exposed to many perspectives, for new ways to think about things. It's useful to learn facts about the space you're in (doing your best to distinguish between fact and opinion). It's useful to discuss ideas, possible problems and opportunities - but not in terms of judging your idea, but in terms of seeing what's there.

With knowledge and experience of reality, you will develop your own sense of what will work. You still won't know, of course; but you'll be more confident of trying it.
I've always found pre-written CSS to get in my way, but then again, CSS is practically my first language (with clean, semantic HTML).
Reminds me of the original iBook...antiquated design.
I recognized the irony, but well, bikeshedding. Can't resist.
Sure. But you're only allowed to sell in a "coffee shop". And demand there is probably too high to support such a model.
Wow I honestly can't believe that pg is so short sighted.

Let's compare work that's being directly copied by competitors:

Microsoft:
C#, actually for that matter the entire .NET Framework, Singularity, Gazelle, Visual Studio, Powershell, Office, WPF, Silverlight, Photosynth, the list goes on and on

Apple:
iPhone

Microsoft is by no means "dead" or "irrelevant". Generally I like reading Paul Graham's essays, but I think this one is a bunch of gibberish.
Does it matter? Aren't they a commodity?
I'd say the startup MBA is starting one.

I don't mean that just as a metaphor, either. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it one day starting a company is considered an acceptable educational experience, in the same way an internship or apprenticeship is.
I read it more as needing our advice.

Observation: if real life people are too nice, you can get plenty of brutal feedback online - but note that harsh words are no more necessarily true than are kind words false.

BTW http://google.com/search?q=entrepeneur+site:http://jessicama... didn't find any of the "entrepreneur" misspelling you mention.
Dude your problem is not ad networks, rather the monetizing strategy. Traffic is huge, but comes from 600 some search terms / phrases (very, very defragmented). I’d group all search term based on similarity. Find yourself some kick ass affiliate offers to go along with each visitor group. Serve the ads accordingly, instead of relying on Google welfare. Based on what I’ve tried and seen, you should be able to get $20/25 CPM at minimum.
Ipod Touch without the music built in... even better!

Actually, I'd prefer this to a netbook, especially if it isn't locked down.
I think you mean:

(defun make-incrementers ()
(let ((i 0))
(cons (lambda () (incf i))
(lambda () (decf i)))))
Identity as Collateral: Preserving Hacker News
Thanks! Those looks pretty slick.
It's your choice who you take business advice from.

I don't know her personally, but she's young, bright, trying really hard, and going to succeed.

You on the other hand, joined 29 days ago and are whining like an arrogant prick.

Edit: It's ok to submit your own post, because you are only voting for it once...
And this is what the packaging looks like: http://bit.ly/WTxHK

[update] pictures are back up at the original posting
...and the OCaml version is a tenth as many lines of code as the C, and a quarter as many as Python, Ruby, and Perl. Also, it uses only a seventh more memory than the C version.

For what it's worth, the OCaml version is a markup processor of the author's design, and not exactly Markdown-compatible. He argues that it's close enough for benchmarking purposes, though. (I agree.)
I think quoting oneself is like talking about oneself in the third person... it's socially awkward.

Also the basic format of a quotation

"words words words" - attribution

is like using bold/italics/underline all at once... conveying to the reader that you think this point is super critical/insightful. If you walked up to someone and said "listen to what I'm about to say because it's really insightful", I suspect it'd provoke the same reaction as quoting yourself in writing does.

Unfortunately, if you just write the one line you want to say, without acting like it's a quote at all, you have to rely on someone else to add the bold/italics/underline and pass it on. Also, it'd really stand out on your quotes page, not being in quotation marks and all. ;)
If somebody posted an article on Python best practices with no evidence of Python experience, you'd be singing a very different tune. But I guess double standards are OK.

I didn't say a thing about the poster's age, intelligence, effort, or destiny. My point is that people shouldn't be giving such strong advice when it's based on nothing of substance.

"arrogant prick"

ad hominem argument for the win.
Created 403 days ago, just to make this one comment "I agree" ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=azrealus

I should clarify: accounts with this usage pattern seem to be common practice for spammers, that have been discussed on HN before.

azrealus, if you are a real person, I apologize for jumping to conclusions. I certainly have no problem with a real person, usage frequency isn't important - although it is preferable to contribute something to the discussion more than "I agree", since an upvote signals that.
I'm pretty sure the solution isn't to identify users. That would be too intrusive. I'm still betting on keeping crap off the frontpage.

The definition of crap may have to get broader. We may have to kill stories related to politics even when they're intellectually interesting. We'll see.
Lessons from LiveFromYou
Perhaps it would have been the 25th instead of the 20th. The Western European civilization has been a miraculous and unprecedented thing, and the Church was one of the main ingredients. It's impossible to say how things would have turned out without it, but the average historical outcome for a people of collapsed civilization seems to have been rather grim.
If the topmost port in the fourth picture of http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/techcrunch-tablet-updat... is not a USB port, I don't know what it is. Since a barcode scanner is basically a keyboard, you almost certainly don't even need any extra support from them. I think you're in luck.

(Also, I don't want to make a separate post: That link also says "we were aiming for $200, it looks like $299 is more realistic".)
A fancy title for what amounts to addition and function evaluation.
If I was going to launch something like this, I'd want to keep it secret until it was ready for market. Arrington obviously made a mistake by posting the photos, and it ruined the surprise.

I took them down to be nice. TechCrunch has never done me harm. But I put them back up because they seem to have propagated everywhere now.
This one is by far the best:

Dear maintainer:

Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
please increment the following counter as a warning
to the next guy:

total_hours_wasted_here = 16
Ah, so we've now reached the point where we frequently cite poster tenure?
There's a great bit about this in the first chapter of the SICP.
I made a graph kind of like that:
http://files.dangrover.com/howispentmyyear_draft_annotated.p...

I need to normalize the data more to get a better picture. But right now, this is all of my time productively spent outside of any school or dayjob.
My bad on the misspelling, I sometimes leave out the extra "r." The quotes imply that this person is in fact not much of an entrepreneur.
The problem with "asking for the brutal truth" is that no one knows what it is.

Users know, in the sense that they embody it. That's one reason it's good to launch quickly: so that users can tell you precisely how far along you are with the idea.
OCaml is exceptionally well-suited to writing compilers, or
anything dealing with complex structures of tagged data, really. (See, for instance, http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/case-for-ml.html )

It's a neat language. It's got some implementation and usability quirks, and it seems to have a rather small / quiet community (so there aren't many books, though this one is quite good, IMHO: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/ ), but it's worth a look.
Good catch. Some optimistic back-of-the-envelope says it could be around 5 min for the liter of water. (The egg should go faster, if I remember my WWII-in-North-Africa frying-eggs-on-tanks movie scenes right ;-)

Assumptions: 1 square meter blackbody collector for 1 kW/m2 solar radiation, plus dt of 80C (which, for 1l water, needs 80 kcal = 80 x 1.162 Wh) -> 335 seconds.

I'd say a one square meter (~10 sq.feet) box is about equivalent to a standard 700W microwave - between 10 am and 3 pm on sunny days ...
It's interesting that you don't find a 403 day old account with only 1 (content-free) comment a little odd.
No he leaked them on purpose to drive up interest in the project. What we're all doing right now is exactly what he wants.
Historical domain inbound links, rate of appearance of the new inbound links, and authority of the domain and documents where they come from
They needed to throw businesses a bone.

TripAdvisor has had this feature for a while, as has RateItAll.
I'm surprised that I'm mostly 3s and 2s after 4 years of experience at Intel and 1.5 years experience doing side work at college jobs. Working on many projects has allowed me to focus strongly in a few areas. I'm still a "1" in TDD because I only write unit scripts after the code is written and focus more on getting stuff accomplished.
Friendfeed Ahead of its Time, Twitter Ahead in the Race
Encouraging (or requiring) users to link their accounts with a physical identity is certainly a more drastic action than Reddit.com or Digg.com could take, and it very well might be overly broad, but I strongly suspect that limiting the front-page stories won't be enough.

As you commented in "What I've Learned from Hacker News", it's not so much the stories, but the comments, which see the greatest tarnish as new users enter any community without necessarily understanding the culture.

I love Hacker News, and I suspect I'll remain a member as long as you will permit me, but it disappoints me when I see comments along the line of "So what?"..

What's more subtle is the increase in sarcasm- It's not that any particular comment is terribly hurtful, but it indicates a culture of people who are showing off, or attacking one another, rather than working together.

I'm ashamed to admit that at the worst of times, it reminds me more of 4chan than a college coffee shop.

Of course, such feelings are mostly isolated, at least for now, but I'm more worried about preserving the commenting culture than the submitted stories.
I don't see a problem with someone submitting their own blog posts if they're topical.
Great idea and implementation.
It's possible. I'm happy to drive up interest in this though. It looks like a genuinely awesome product.
It is odd, but I don't care much for the practice of inspecting user profiles, except when browsing submitted content.

Edit: I've thought about this a bit, and I think it's wrong to suspect users in this way. There are likely many who just vote on stories and don't feel the need to leave comments. Maybe the commenter is just getting their feet wet...
What else does integration primarily entail ?
I would buy one if I could take hand-written notes on it. That's the ability that I most envy my friends with tablets for.