skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually I did specifically say that!

If you re-read my post (or read through the comments) you'll see that I specifically agree that you SHOULD be direct and not be cagey. I do the same thing.

However, it's ALSO true that if you NEVER talk about the process of making decisions, then you're only telling half the story.

I'm not saying people should write differently. Even I won't, generally.

I'm saying that it's ALSO useful to take time sometimes to talk about what life is really like so people don't get the wrong impression.
Correct, that's why I wrote it!

I love 37signals of course. They shouldn't change.

But I'd also like to tell new startup owners that their feelings are normal, even though they aren't reflected at places like 37signals' public persona.
The browser is designed for browsing HTML pages, NOT to do everything under the sun.

Developers need to move beyond the browser and create a more heavy-duty general-purpose Internet application -- or create a framework for installing more domain-specific Internet applications in a sandbox.
I don't want them to use caveats either. I don't either in my own writing!

Rather, I want to step back every so often and show others that real life isn't like this. That it's ok to be scared and unsure.

That this is a WRITING DEVICE and not reality.
MSN Encarta to be Discontinued
Incremental mapreduce
>the 10 year (or 10,000 hours) road to expertise

Why is this figure being bandied about as though it were an actual scientific fact?
I'm not underestimating the amount of effort it takes to create a good typeface. I'm saying that the market value of making one of your faces free/embeddable is likely to be high enough that at least a few indies (not "open source" font dorks, but people like David Březina, who don't have a permanent home at FF or HFJ or Adobe) will release their work --- because why not?
Positively Misguided: The Myths & Mistakes of the Positive Thinking Movement
Today it's a plugin. Tomorrow it's probably built in to Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.
I've tried it a bit, but I found the syntax rather ugly compared to Haskell. I know, I'm nitpicking and it really shouldn't matter that much, but it put me off the language. Perhaps when they finally release a full-blown implementation of F# for Visual Studio I'll give it another go.
My main reason for still using C# at the moment is the UI integration with WPF and Windows Forms. Ideally there'd be an actively maintained Haskell.NET, but perhaps F# can serve as a compromise when Visual Studio 2010 comes out.
I also recommend "Javascript: The Good Parts". It and the jQuery library can teach you a lot about how Javascript is really a functional language with more in common with Lisp than with C++ or Java.

A second excellent book is "Higher Order Perl", which shows how Perl, also, shares a lot more in common with Lisp than most developers realize. I'm on my 13th year as a professional developer and 27th as a hacker, and I still find some of the concepts in HoP challenging.

I would also recommend learning XSLT. It's pure declarative, side-effect-free programming. If you're used to procedural code (including OOP), or even functional code, you'll still have to reattach your head sideways to learn to use XSLT effectively. It's well worth the challenge; there are problems that would be very difficult to handle in other languages which XSLT handles with ease; it's a powerful tool for your toolchest.
I think Douglas Adams would be happy to hear this.
"You don't have to make it impossible,"

As it stands right now, you do, because the font foundries won't stand for anything less. If they were happy with probabilities they would have been in the game a long time ago.

Note this is a social thing, not a technical thing.
Assassination Politics: "Translate the freedom afforded by the Internet to ordinary life."
I can guarantee you that these guys already have digital tablets, and yet they still prefer starting with paper.

Paper still has the advantage in several areas, not the least of which is that people more readily accept a sketch on paper as a preliminary draft while they expect something on the computer to be polished.
It may not be a zero sum game but it is definitely a major issue. Real life has constraints and unless you're one of the very few creative designers who understand beauty and UI very well, you have to decide how much time to spend on making something prettier vs. making something more useful. For most people, these two are not the one and the same thing.
Did you even RTFA? The whole point was that they're inseparable.
On the other hand, I see the title, and think: "Oh dear, another funky 3d javascript library which is completely impractical and useless for any real application..."

Then I look at the article and see:

O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser.

Perfect! Someone big finally taking initiative and creating a plugin which might actually eventually have a large userbase.
I found SICP was better for learning to "think functionally". PCL and On Lisp were both great in their own right, but idiomatic CL isn't as strictly functional as idiomatic Scheme tends to be (and neither enforces it like Haskell and Erlang do).

As for improving my skills, that's an unequivocal yes. I think the biggest eureka moment came when I understood the idea of first class functions. That opened many doors to better code.

Before, I used functions primarily like a writer uses paragraphs: to break up the narrative into chunks. After SICP, I saw functions more like (for lack of a better term) filters. They transform their input into output. The transformation is well defined, and the natural boundaries between functions become clear rather than arbitrary.
Some good points in there, particularly as far as books go. Something similar applies to music, in that:

* there is more of a tendency to go for immediate satisfaction than for challenging listening as we flick through the large amount of available music to find things we like

* we move away from listening to music an experience (including the disc as an object, the cover art, and the visual associations it can create) and consuming music as more of a commodity

In summary, the high availability of content online means that the content itself is devalued. The availability is great, but it's a shame if the increase in range affects depth.
I actually model allowable acquisition cost on expected first year average revenue per user (less any marginal service costs like bandwidth or storage). The key variables are % of users that have a transaction and the average transaction size. If you have a monthly recurring fee, then you also have to consider churn. I'd recommend a conservative estimate of an average of six months of revenue in the first year for each paying customer on a monthy recurring fee. Annual fee is obviously the entire transaction size. Hope this makes sense.

Sean Ellis (startup-marketing.com, led early marketing at both Dropbox and Xobni)
It's a good summary of one of the points Plato made in The Republic. Great article, even with the post-LSD writing style.
Web Fonts - View on the web fonts issue from a font designer
This seems like the real beginning of the end for Omniture. I interviewed with them once and their strategy for defeating Google in analytics was to just move faster. With Google's developer base, that doesn't seem possible.
What I Wish I Had Known About Developing C/C++ From Linux Before I Started
If you are not an experienced developer yourself, I recommend against it. It is too easy to get dragged down by someone who is not good. Just like here, some are very good and a lot more are terrible. I have worked with programmers from the Ukraine, India, and China. The Ukrainians were the best and the Chinese the worst. The Ukrainians had the best education, practices, and experience. All were employees of moderately large companies. Even so when I asked a colleague about hiring Ukrainians he said use an intermediary you trust.
> Typeface vendors are welcome to do that too, using the law

That's almost completely impractical. How would you find out when someone steals your typeface?

Image libraries and photo agencies face a similar problem (I used to work for one.)
Interesting. It seems to have got stalled in the gray area between the right to sell cigarettes as a commodity and the argument to have tobacco regulated by the FDA: http://articles.latimes.com/2005/oct/30/business/fi-chrysali...
Why is it that twitter search only ranks by date?
Why not take advantage of the tweeters' number of followers as well as similarity to other tweets?
How are you protecting against spam? How do any of these no-signup services protect against spam without resorting to captchas?
Ask HN: At Google, are you able to read every online scientific journal for free?
Paywall-protected journal articles often appear in search results (in Google Scholar and otherwise.) Can anyone here who works for Google tell us if all of these results are freely loadable from the Google campus's IP range? This seems likely, given how they are indexable by the search engine but are blocked to anyone else save paid subscribers. Google could easily put a stop to this abuse by declaring that it will publicly cache any page which it finds to be different when loaded from its publicly-known IP range than from a separate, secret IP.
Hmm, when periodic "geek chic" reddit memes show up here, this is not a good sign.

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7olm7/geek_gang_signs_...

And that's just the most recent incarnation. This has been around for years.
Large-scale Semantic Networks: Annotation and Evaluation [pdf]
The samples don't really seem to be working though. Clicking through auto-inputs an ID, but the next step does not show anything (on the graphs). Does this work for anyone?
First Google Android Netbooks spotted
Is Omniture really a direct competitor with Google Analytics? I haven't used it (Omniture) in a long time, but last time I did we used it extensively for A-B testing, click tracking and other user-experience type events that I don't generally use Google Analytics for.

I am fully aware that I'm probably using about 10% of Google Analytics potential, so maybe they already do all this kind of stuff.

The thing I remember the most about Omniture is this: it was expensive as hell.
I'm not convinced that this is something that needs "fixing."
While I'll concede that OOP is not the be-all-and-end-all of programming paradigms, I have a hard time thinking of it as a failure.

It seems to me that since the advent of OOP hitting the mainstream, the world has seen more and better software than ever before, written by more people. So in what way is this a failure?
As others said, It's too close to the star to be habitable, but the good news is that it is 1.9 times the mass of the earth, meaning that the chances of finding earth size planets in a habitable zone are getting very good. M class stars are not good candidates for habitable planets, because they would probably be tidally locked and the stars are less stable. G and K stars are better, but the planets are harder to find, because the stars are so much larger and brighter.
Use clicky, http://getclicky.com

I've run A/B experiments via them.
Because its a useful ball park.
You seem to be living in a world that does not have much to do with reality. It's not "crazy" to pay $300 for Vista when the programs you know are on Vista. People are paying $300 right this moment to not have to use Ubuntu.

Quantity does not lead to quality - if it did everyone would be using open source web design. Why are they not?
I wouldn't call Rails and Python "Lisp-like languages."
I suspect the paywall protected articles that Google runs across aren't protected by IP address, but by User-Agent string. I've seen a few hacks for this (look at the NYT User Agent hack), and the FF plugin that allows you to alter your UA string indicates this similarly.

Put another way, I don't know if Google necessarily has registered all of its crawling IP addresses. Sure, you could do a reverse IP lookup -- but you'd have to do that on every request, which can get expensive.

No, the cheap-easy route is probably something as mundane as UA string.
I agree, real gamers will download their games every time to get the latest tech.

Having 3D in a browser(that runs fast, unlike existing solutions) is a huge advantage for creating richer web-pages with embedded 3D visualizations.

IMHO generalized 3D rendering solutions tend to be poor compromises. They definitely don't make for cool non-homogenized looking games. But having some standard win is nice for academic and learning purposes as there ends up being more commonality between code samples.

On another note: it was a smart move on Google's part to build a slightly higher level system than say OpenGL, as doing collision detection for instance in Javascript is going to be dog-slow for awhile(At least across the board until the newer javascript engines are adopted more broadly).
Second the posts here. It's computationally cheap to issue a certificate. Godaddy figured, hey, why not try to take some business away from the other players? Minimal cost to them, once they got the issuing authority credentials from FF/IE/Safari/etc.
I'm curious what the actual question is. Is it your headline or what you have in the description? As you probably know, the point of Gutmann isn't just to flip bits . . . it rewrites them like 35 times to reduce the magnetic remanence of the physical drive material to something too difficult for someone to measure with precision unless they've got extremely expensive tools.

If I were going Fermi on the "how much energy to flip a bit" question, I'd reason that the average desktop computer has a 400W power supply and that a hard drive would need to draw at least two orders of magnitude less power than the power supply in order to allow for a stable machine. So let's say the drive draws ~1 watt of power.

I'd assume that the SATA drive is rated for 10,000 RPM. So let's say our 1 watt drive can hit ~100 drive locations per second. Let's assume that each drive location corresponds to a bit. A watt is just Joules/sec, so it takes one Joule to flip ~10^2 bits, or ~10^-2 Joules to flip a bit. I'd probably take that down an order of magnitude because I assume that the vast majority of the energy goes into moving physical components of the disk rather than into the actual charge imparted to flip the bits. So my answer would be ~10^-3 Joules to flip a bit.
A word of caution for those who make their profiles public. Most people simply append their gmail handle for these profiles. For example, JohnSmith@gmail.com would use the profile www.google.com/profiles/johnsmith.

It becomes incredibly easy for spammers to pull these handles from public searches, add an '@gmail.com' and spam them.
No you don't want to pay. You say you do, but if you walked by a street and two guys stood there, one guy offering you a DVD for free and not saying a word, and the other guy yelling at you to buy the very same DVD from him, you'd take the free one.

You don't want to pay for the movie, and if you really think that, you're lying to yourself.
Professional Fonts for 99cts coming soon!

Only at the AppStore
Ask HN: Cost of 1 Person LLC
Hi!

I would like to form a LLC, with me owning the company (and no investors; and no plan for future investors) -- mainly for releasing iPhone, facebook apps, and silly web 2.0 apps.

I want to know how much this will cost me, in the form of $BASE + $RECURRING_PER_YEAR .

I live in CA, and am willing to file the LLC in Deleware (I hear it's much easier in Deleware?). I'm also a student (so only permenant address is a PO Box), so I need some other company to officially be the 'location/address' of my LLC.

If you have gone through this, or know of a good article on this (I keep on getting crap like "Come to our website, we'll file for you for $199.99") please let me know.

Thanks!
</p>
Hehe, yesterday I was just messing around with some screen scraping for Analytics. Talk about good timing :) This should open up some fun projects.
A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding (series)
There are 2 iphone apps that already tap into google analytics. One is Ego (http://ego-app.com) and another is analtyics app (http://analyticsapp.com/) Both not bad.
""I started "thinking in sets" and found that I was much more effective.""

Actually that is the power of Lisp. In Lisp, batch or stream data processing is not only straightforward, but the way to think and program.
Why? Do you believe that fonts are not creative works? Would copyrightability of fonts hurt anyone?
This is a nice list! However, I really think that increasing speed of development with better tools is a cornerstone of being one of those elite programmers, and vim<<eclipse, at least for Java! I haven't done C/C++ for some time... but I expected similar IDEs exist. "The way our development environment is set up though, there was really no good way to use Eclipse because everything is done on a remote development box, and they won’t let us run Eclipse and forward over X (which is reasonable; Eclipse has a lot of overhead)" I think this is just a horrendous setup and unless there is some compelling reason (e.g. scientific computing on a cluster? even then...) that there should be a much cleaner separation between development boxes and production boxes and most of your code should be developed on a local box with some canned data for testing and then pushed out to production when that is done. This may require some effort, but the decrease in turnaround time for changes will be worth it in almost every scenario.
Conversion rates are important to them because they buy expensive keywords via Google AdWords.

Imagine this scenario:

* say you have to pay $20 for an ad click on "SQL Server backup"

* the conversion rate is 10%

* with a 10% conversion rate, each sale will have $200 ($20 divided by 0.10) in marketing costs

* If the product costs $300, you have $100 ($300-200) in "profit"

However, if the conversion rate is 5%...

* each sale would have $400 in marketing costs ($20 divided by 0.05)

* you lose $100 per sale

Given the high cost per click for specialized keywords, they need a high conversion rate to use AdWords profitably.
Faking the UA string does nothing on all of the journal sites I've tried.
I use "screen" a lot, but I wish it had a better name. It helps if you search for "gnu-screen", but not much.

Here's a tip that has saved me once or twice. If you start a long-running process, but forgot to use screen or nohup, bash lets you 'disown -h' its jobspec.
my thoughts exactly. in my last job, i spent over two years writing linux server apps. but i developed all my code on a mac. the low-level posix apis are nearly identical between the two, so other than a few ifdefs, i could barely tell the difference.
Using MySQL with Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC – Part II
It's interesting to hear from type designer, certainly not a voice that is heard often enough, at least not in the web developer community. His concern that "someone can take one of our fonts, put it in a freely accessible directory on their server, that’s a violation of most of our license agreements" is nothing new. Håkon's "free font" technique does not introduce this problem, nor does it make it any worse in my opinion.

As a side note, I find it incredibly ironic how difficult it is to read that web page due to the "design" choices made. Thank god for readability: http://blog.arc90.com/2009/04/readability_updated_with_some....
So what does this mean? Are we now in another race to gobble up good profile names for better Google results?
Whereas it only takes a single class of scandanavian middle-schoolers to keep KDE thoroughly mediocre!
Actually it says that's when you'll announce winners, which why I wasn't clear on the deadline. Thanks for the info.
Presumably, you have a licensed user list and you audit the use of your intellectual property. I can't help it that this is hard, but that's the only even remotely practical solution that isn't a false sense of security. Wishing that people don't infringe is extremely ineffective, especially when you have an extremely sharp sword, the law, at your disposal to assist with enforcement.

Interestingly, one of the well known cases for keeping a trademark is that you make moves to protect it by stopping infringers. In some respects, it makes sense that those who want other, similar kinds of intellectual property protections be subject to the same requirements. Trademarks and copyrights both protect things that don't have hard physical manifestations that provide inherent limits on their reproducibility, so it may be reasonable that they are both afforded the same methods of protection.
It's a rather massive codebase, and our remote dev machines are a lot beefier than our laptops -- also 64-bit, whereas our laptops are 32-bit. I'm not saying it couldn't be done locally, but it might actually cause more headaches than it solves.
“You can be president of the Unites States, if you really want to!"

This one motivates person to at least try his best

A more truthful message would be, "You have much higher odds of being struck by lightning than of ever becoming president of the United States"

This one motivates the person to sit on his backside and do nothing.

My guess would be that if everyone was thinking in terms of "truthfulness", we would not have a civilization at all. After all, there's always more chances to NOT make a discovery than to make one, to NOT become the next Google than to become one, to NOT find a new continent than to find one etc.

And of course, he was going to miss a few blocks. But, suppose that everything else is equal - training, physical abilities, skill, and your opponents are ready to give it all and fight for each ball, while your teams is expecting to miss a few here and there - who would have better chances?
I don't know that it's necessarily easier to form an LLC in Delaware than anywhere else. Companies usually prefer to incorporate in Delaware because it has the longest history of corporate law, so that more precedents have been set than in other states. By forming an LLC, it kind of removes the benefit of having that long history of precedence since LLCs are relatively new.

As always, this is where getting a professional involved is worthwhile. A lawyer or accountant who specializes in this sort of work can tell you what the various legal liabilities you'll have to deal with in each state are, as well as how your choices impact your tax liabilities.

[Edit: This previously had a sentence about code formatting in the submission; the formatting has since been fixed.]
Python's lead designer is actively hostile to this, actually. (And Rails isn't a language, goshdarnit...)

Lua is very Scheme-y, though, much the way Javascript is.

While I don't use Ruby much (Python and Lua fit that niche for me), it seems more Lisp-y than Python.
What I'd really like is an Excel plugin/toolbar that uses this API to let me create a dashboard for my sites inside an Excel spreadsheet.

Downloading 20 CSVs once a week (and pasting them into my spreadsheet) is labor-intensive and lame.
Well, he's talking about relational databases, which approach sets from a very different angle.
I got into Lisp through Emacs, but more recently I've been understanding it using Clojure.

For me, I need to be able to create something tangible. Having access to all the Java libraries gives me a lot of cool things to import, then play around with in functional ways.
Announcing the Enlightened Perl Iron Man Competition
PediSedate : Improving the Lives of Our Children?
Good points.

StackOverflow is my favorite site that I discovered this year. Its community is incredible. I hope you guys make enough money off of it to stay open for a long time.