skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is the point of limiting website width to specific pixels, especially why go over so much thought for something from 960 -> 1020 or something small like that? You'd think with the netbook and mobile browser shrinking that the designers would stick to their guns.
I would show less tweets as no one can read 99 of them. If you must, have a more button like HN has.

The most important thing is putting the best tweets at the top -- basically it is a search/aggregation website, so your choice of what to show is what will differentiate you.

Love the low-light switching feature.
I was once explaining the Baader-Meinhof Phenomoenon to someone and then went to a movie and there was a trailer for a movie about the Baader-Meinhof gang.

True story!
Ask HN: building on google base api
What are the cons of building your webapp completely on google base.

There's no hosting costs and your application is completely scalable and reduced to one web page, which you can host on blogspot for free for example. ie. completely serverless/costless with unlimited scaling.
And furthermore, using google spreadsheet api's when user data needs to be private (each users data stored in their own account).
Quantum Computer
Why Do Organic Eggs Come in Plastic Containers?
I would consider that this guy, being actually homeless, is at least as valuable a source on homelessness as a woman you knew who worked with them.

I suspect that more generally than being alcoholics, these are people who are mentally ill to some extent. I liked this essay (and others from this writer) because this is a homeless guy I could identify with. I could read his stuff and not think this was some situation which could never come close to happening to me or someone I would care about.
I loved that even in the midst of being hassled by the police, he gives the one policeman incredible credit for his approach to other humans. There is beauty everywhere.
Ask HN: wireless Internet?
I've been itching to try a 3G wireless card for a while. When my contract with T-Mobile expires I'm finally can switch to a carrier who offers good wireless access. Sprint, Verizon and AT&G all advertise as super fast, but just like with anything else there're some losers and some winners.

Which 3G service in NYC area do you guys use? How's your impressions? Also, the hardware needs to be easily compatible with Macs. Thanks.

P.S. Of course I'm googling, but asking for something here always brings unexpected new perspective on just about anything.
That's fairly accurate ... we have a separate CS team but they are very busy answer client tickets. They don't really have time to answer pre-sales questions.

Does this mean we need a new CS person and no sales people?
It seems that IT sector is quite unaffected by current recession. Of course it suffers as whole economy slows down, but still perform much better then the other industries.

1 year of indexes

S&P 500: -38.26%

Dow Jones Industrial Average: -37.66%

Nasdaq Composite: -33.56%
Web 2.0 in Iraq
Or we could just go back to hacker news. And stop sweating what other people would think about us reading it.
Heck - in California it takes a two-thirds majority to pass the annual budget
I agree, you're right about the low dividend. But the argument against paying a high price for MS's future earnings stands. I conflated two ideas, but although I actually believe MS's conservative cash position is perhaps their best strength - I still believe they had a valuable monopoly & lost their way.
I love the smell of beauty at dusk.
I had a rant all prepared but decided against it.

A fixed width page that has been well designed for 1024x768 (such as this article) is frustrating to read on my 1600x1200 LCD, and would be even worse on a 1900x1200 LCD.

Maybe an extension to CSS that permits specifying "Widescreen" or "Netbook" as alternatives to "screen" and "print" or whatever would be helpful. I'd sure like an option that says "I'm not blind and I'd like to use the pixels I've paid for."

Maybe since Javascript is ok again designers could design two or three widths and have browser page detection select the smartest layout. Having a 1024x{600,768} design for netbooks and grandma would and a 1400+ column design for people using large screens and professional grade notebooks.
I believe that strippers' earnings are somewhat proportionate to hours worked.
Do the people who write the underlying engines/frameworks (I know little of game development) have it better than those assigned to particular titles?
I am stating reality as I see it and then deriving my morals from that view of reality. Your argument starts from a desired result (the 'elevation of humans') and works back toward reality from there.

Humans are meat. That is reality. Even if the consequences of realising this was rampant cannibalism it wouldn't change that fact.

To me the thing that separates humans from animals is also the thing that would make us not want to torture them. We are able to model reality in more detail and to do this we need to be able to consider each situation from all perspectives. Considering reality from the view of an animal in pain would cause any empathetic being some degree of pain. Those that block this or just can't see this part of reality have a second rate existence in my view and are frankly little better than animals.
You could add however many CS people you need to handle the extra load and then rotate some of them (not all may be suitable for this - pick the extroverts) into answering pre-sales inquiries, say one week out of four.

If I phone you already thinking I am interested in your product and talked to someone who sounded deeply knowledgeable about the service, this would increase my confidence level more than if I talked to a smooth-talker (obviously not knowing your niche this may not apply).

Fundamentally I think you need to listen in on some of the phone calls your sales people are taking. What are your customers looking for at that stage? Do they want to talk about pricing a lot? Do they want to discuss functionality or ask about future features?
I've found this tutorial on 4 of the big clustering algoritms helpful:

http://home.dei.polimi.it/matteucc/Clustering/tutorial_html/...

I've always been curious about the subject, and would love to know more. I've admittedly not gotten very far.
I suspect that the public vastly overestimates entertainment industry earnings due to availability bias. Headlines like "<Star Name> earns $XXM for <movie>" are more common than "relatively unknown supporting actor earns enough to maintain SAG membership."

Likewise, young women probably perceive the porn industry to be much more lucrative than it actually is. I've read that they get paid between $500 and $2K per scene. While that sounds amazing to an eighteen year-old working at McDonald's, it probably translates into $100K annually for three or four years until younger talent takes their places.
The industry average conversion ratio for visits -> purchases is often quoted as 1%. But is this supported by a survey of small software vendors?
Locavore’s first month in the App Store
Ugh, no. This penalizes people with larger screens.

1920x1200 = two windows of 960px

2560x1600 = three windows of ~850px
As an AIX user/victim for a long time I was hoping/fearing to see that as well. :)

Ah, AIX isn't too bad if you get the GNU utilities installed.
It's my understanding that they've been there for years. IBM will install a mainframe with N cores even if a company only wants to pay for N/2 cores initially. Then, the company can ask IBM to turn on the switch (or just turn it on themselves and be honest?) and increase its capacity. No idea if they can throttle back, say after Christmas, though. Of course, it's not a perfect parallel as IBM parks the whole thing in the customer's own datacenter. I think there may also be some pay-for-mips options as well.
ah, it's the end of an era ... i'll miss it.
I don't pretend to understand this stuff, but the summary seems to be:

When you raise money by selling stock, you give away power in your company in exchange. This is a scheme to retain power by making the stock that you keep more powerful than the one you sell to other people.

Pros: you retain more control. Cons: You might not find people to buy your stock under those terms.

I'd be surprised if investors like this.
That would be pg
On a similar vain I'd like to point out that Mechanical Turk jobs can only be submitted by people from the US. I can't see any reason for this. It does tend to reinforce the image of inequality.

Any thoughts and any ways to get around this?
Seems apparent that this article really struck a nerve with HN :)

I agree with your post wholeheartedly and on all accounts. You don't get readers without starting some arguments, though.
Mechanical Turk is generally used for things that machines still can't do with nearly the accuracy that humans can. Image recognition, facial recognition, translation, dictation, etc.

No matter how much hardware you throw at those problems, you can't (yet) match what a human brain can do in a split second. I don't think that's depressing.
I'm taking statistics at the moment too, actually. I understand what you're saying. I was simply remarking on the pleasantness of seeing a correlation between my academic material and real-world applications.
Cheer up. People are not cheaper than machines, they're just better at some tasks. You'd have to complete tens of thousands of those stupid little tasks to pay your rent for a month...if they could be done by machine reliably, they would be.
This is a great signal to Amazon AWS customers that EC2 is endorsed for large enterprise use. I'm not saying that it is ready or that it's actually endorsed. However, that's what Blue shops will think.

I wonder if existing Websphere/DB2 users will see value in switching over given that they've already paid for their licenses. Will IBM cut a three-way deal with Amazon to reduce per-hour costs?

It's not likely that organizations considering EC2 for new development will choose IBM on EC2 -- forward thinking folk aren't too keen on $20K/server licenses when the Open Source stuff is better.

So, I'm left to conclude that Amazon is the winner here. They get credibility with organizations that value what Big Blue says, and those organizations might choose to deploy non-Blue systems on EC2.
To add another data point. I recently rented a 2 BR apt in a nice complex in Santa Clara for $1400. The ad asked for $1500, but I negotiated it down to $1400 with a slightly longer lease term. Just 6 months ago, the same apt was renting for $1800.
By that logic, if your company provided Windows 3.1 you would go around saying Windows has no multiuser support.

Windows has an interface for doing what you asked. It had a bug / didn't work as described so they fixed it. Your company wont buy the fix, but that doesn't mean the fix doesn't exist. It means you can't take advantage of it, sure.

But saying Windows doesn't support it is deliberately misrepresenting Windows to make it look bad. It's spreading FUD, and it's wrong.

Plus, why did you bring WMI into this? You can't seem to do it with WMI: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394595(VS.85).aspx "If you are not using DHCP, you cannot use WMI to disable a network connection". Were you just bringing WMI into it because it sounds scary and complicated and so would help shore up your FUD, or is there a way and this MSDN article is wrong?

(But you can do it by scripting the shell: http://mcpmag.com/columns/article.asp?EditorialsID=619 or by using Devcon to disable a hardware device from the command line: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272/en-us )
I've never actually managed to have dough breads turn out right, but my sourdough pancakes and cornbread are ok. The only dough product that works for me is pizza crust.
I'm curious if this is true for all "game developers" or just the sort working at EA and companies that make EA-style games. If you work for Zynga or Playdom, for example, do you have huge crunches and frequent 80 hour weeks? Or is this just the way a few big companies are run.
I suffer every time I'm faced with Yet Another *nix Package Manager, another mess of /usr /usr/local /opt /var inconsistencies as well as every time I have to remote to a Windows machine and can't use SSH.

There is an alternative, but it's not all sunshine and green grass either side.
Ask HN: What other HN-like sites do you read?
What other HN-like sites do you read?
Thank goodness in my engineering department matlab or excel are acceptable. Matlab works well in linux and is a much cheaper more powerful option than the office student edition paired with openoffice. (My school runs 2003 office though so thats a big difference in teachers required file formats).

The new ubuntu has better font smoothing by default however I don't think that transfers into wine sadly but at least you found a setup that works.
That doesn't stop a corporate firewall from blocking the site.
They got to 100k users because the person creating a group can add however many email addresses they want to each group. There is no invitation step, like there is with Google or Yahoo groups.

So they can sign up a thousand people a day with a hundred people creating groups of 10.

And since it's free text & email blasting, it seems like this would be a spammer's dream come true.
This thread will tell you all you need to know:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575815
Indeed. I like writing code, but I dislike writing more code than absolutely necessary to solve a problem.

Also, this might not be relevant in this case, but I feel like there's a difference between "coding" and "programming". In my mind, coding is a dull task of translating an existing design into code, whereas "programming" is more problem solving, which includes coding. Being called a "coder" is almost derogatory sounding to me.
960->1020 isn't necessarily that small depending on what the space is used for.

If it's just making a content column wider then it's not really that useful in most cases, but if it's adding another column with useful information for the user, then it is a big deal - it makes the website that much easier to use.
I have a crazy 15" Omnibook laptop with 1400x1050 (!) resolution on it. I still design my Windows app dialogs to be no more than 600x400.
New Mogul

http://www.newmogul.com/

for business news. It uses the same ARC-based software as HN, so it's easy to learn the user interface.
I'd really like the ability to share access with my cofounders. Without that one of us ends up being a choke point.
Since it was part of the deal they were working under, I don't fault them for wanting them.

To answer your question: Plenty of state and federal workers get pensions, as do public school teachers and other public servants. If they stopped offering them, the jobs would be that much less attractive. It's part of the compensation scheme.
absolutely! I remember once when my monitor resolution reached 1280x1024 and beyond (especially now on wide screens), I quit browsing with a maximized browser. Even if the browser was maximized and page was full of content, border to border, it would be hell to read/use. Imagine old newpaper format of gargantuan A1 size, it sucks.
The 8 hour work day is a social construct, which is rare throughout human history and unique to certain times and places. Japan has essentially never had it. France doesn't have it today. It survives more due to social inertia than anything else.

I've been kicking around a blog post on this for a while. (I am really not a fan of the "work day", for any value of 8-hours.)
Despite my laptop's display having 1440 horizontal pixels, I usually keep my web browser window around 900 pixels wide. I'd like it to be even narrower than that, but too many designers seem to assume it's a full 1024 and make their sites around 960 pixels wide. :)

I do this for two reasons. One is that the remaining space on my screen is for other stuff. The other is that a lot of websites ignore the traditional typographic rules for line length, and even when those rules are followed, the principle of constraining the horizontal size (including things like navigation and sidebars) in order to reduce the necessary eye movement still applies.
What is the story behind it? Did I miss some thread?
Not quite whats going on. It sounds more like they just want to create some sort of international currency instrument which is a blend of %44 dollar, an the rest being a mix of euro, pound and yen. The idea being (cf normal investing) that a blend of these will be more stable than any single one.
On the other hand both industries' "indie" sectors seem to treat their workers a lot better. And both industries let you make your first production from your bedroom, armed with very basic tools!
Even though it will be changed back, I will still say I don't like it. Hacking and IT don't need political correctness, they need freedom of expression.

Ask yourself, "What would Katt Williams say about this change?" He would probably say something like - "Hacker Please!"
OQO's Brutal Lesson: Innovate and Die
An anecdote can be a counterexample.
Not many people - most get 401ks, which are a poor substitute (and incidentally, not originally intended to be used for retirement savings).

As for why they get pensions and you don't, it's mostly due to them being organized and having been around for a while. One of the biggest things that unions, when doing collective bargaining, argue for is that all members be treated the same way, as opposed to workers being treated differently depending on how long they've been there. This isn't to say that unions don't like seniority - they love it - but that after X years of work Joe will have the same benefits that Jack, who's currently worked X years, has now. This is one of their main things they offer to their members: look at what we got Jack, in X years you'll have it too. As a result, every time they redo their contracts, all the new guys get pensions not because people in other jobs get them, but because the other guys in the bargaining unit have it.

As for why they got them in the first place, that's what being part of a large union in a blue-collar field does for you.

Why does the government care? Because most large unions have well-oiled political machines attached to them. Union members have a disproportionately high voting percentage, and are very loyal to what their union recommends. They can get 500 people to do anything political (run a phone bank, show up at a rally, write letters, etc.) very easily and efficiently, which comes in very handy if you're running for something.

From their point of view, the bottom line is that they worked for years with an understanding that part of their compensation would come in the form of pensions, and now (through no fault of their own) the company is dying and can't afford it, because they managed their money poorly. From the government's point of view, it's about a bunch of people that are very politically active and soon to become a lot poorer and on social security.
Latest Twitter Bug: “Misdelivery of Direct Messages”
Zero Remains A Popular App Download Number Among Non-iPhone Owners
Can science determine the age of a Somali pirate?
The real unfortunate thing is that most funds that are offered for 401k use are terrible, expensive, and perform badly.
everything sounded good about moving past 960 until i saw your comment and synthesized it with the knowledge that i do this very frequently.

the other problem with this and fluid designs on wide screens is that it becomes difficult to read text when it is that wide.

the best idea that i have seen is a site (or maybe it was sites, i know I've seen at least one), where the content is 960px but then if your browser window is wider, javascript adds additional content to the right of the content, columns that come down with additional links and further navigation options.
Personal retirement planning is a recent phenomenon -- 401(k) plans didn't even exist until 1978, and they're not really intended to be a replacement for pensions!

Most of the auto workers who are expecting pensions signed up for a different deal than you did. These guys didn't have their whole lives to put money into a retirement account -- they were told that their employers would cover their retirement, and they planned accordingly. To have that safety net pulled now is a disaster for a lot of people, and I don't blame them for complaining.
Let's just let the web designers continue to use 960 and implement browsers with full page zoom that considers 1024 pixels as a relative page width for the whole window, no matter its true width. I think that's what iPhone Safari already does.

To accomodate people with bigger windows, link to bigger images so that they scale as beautifully as text.
More interesting than flattening the set of opinions down to two dimensions would be to see how many dimensions there really were.

Another problem is that people who answer the miniessay question with a negative response get their answers rated lower, because saying "No" isn't as attractive an answer as "Yes, because ...".
Well, to be fair the increasing popularity of the MILF genre stretches that 3-4 years much farther.
I assume by HN-like you mean link aggregators, but for content, I like the Mind Your Decisions blog (unfortunately, posts have become infrequent lately): http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/

LtU is good too, but I don't read it often. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
The basic problem is that traditional designers are still trained to think in terms of canvases or formats, which have a fixed width and height. Moving beyond a fixed height is a cognitive hurdle. Moving beyond a fixed width is only more so, especially when bitmaps are involved.
there are so many stories like this that i've read about zappos... and i've enjoyed every one of them. the link to the video in the post was fascinating (learning about their order fulfillment tech).
You know, I thought about jigs as being sort of like software libraries. I've made jigs for specific projects mostly, but I've made a tapering jig for my table saw and an extension table for my miter saw that I've reused.

One thing I've learned is that there is indeed more than one way to build something. I've been able to take advantage of that when I didn't have the tool a project used, but knew how to get the job done with another.

It's much the same in software. There are many different ways to get the job done. Some tools are certainly better for a job than others, but often one can cut something two different ways and still end up with the same result.
I use Firefox with the Web Developer extension. In the latter, I have a few different Window sizes pre-defined. Changing to the desired Window size in only a drop and click away.
Leaving aside for the moment your assumption that eating animals is equal to torturing them (which is not true).

Your request is to view the world from the point of view of the animal. Well animals do not care in the slightest about the pain of another animal.

So I reject that idea. I prefer to view the world from the point of view of a human. And humans do care, but to a human an animal is food, and a human is not.

To an animal everything is food, there is no category "not food". So by saying humans are meat (and therefor food), you are basically advocating for humans to act as animals.
Suffering? It runs more than one application at once. You don't get viruses if you keep it up to date (unless you're an idiot). Copy and Paste works. There is nothing else out there that I need an OS to do for me. Everything else is in application land, where Mac and Linux sometimes fall flat.

I use Linux/Mac/Windows every day and have no trouble switching between them. If you are suffering under either Mac or Windows, it's your fault, not the OS's fault. If you're suffering under Linux, it's because you aren't enough of a moron to be a full time computer geek like me.