skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might not be the best barometer for submitting a story, but take a peak at http://www.hackrtrackr.com/, I was surprised (still am) how many people participate from within middle[skewed easterly] america. I've always operated under the assumption that HN activity scales according to eastern standard time.
Do they delete your data when you cancel your account?
How well can you live in India on $2 per day?
Frameworks are often byproducts of useful applications/services.
I would have expected that query to return bucketloads of submitted stories as opposed to the meta discussion about /blog.
Anything with low entry barriers has many players and low profit margins.
The classic ActiveRecord 1+N trap.
Why oh why did I not hear about you when I was working on my senior thesis. I have been using Zotero which is pretty good for bibliografies, but keeping track of my research across all my tabs and browsers, plus pdf's I download from JSTOR, Google Scholar, has always been a pain. I will use this when researching for blog posts and sharing with my journalists. Good job!
This is wrong. wrong, wrong, wrong... If I were running mint, I'd shut it down before voilating my users' privacy like this. I'd rather return to the machine than do this.

It's why I don't want venture capital. What mint is doing makes me feel dirty. Thank goodness I never created a mint.com account.
A unique password for each site. One password to remember.

Sounds like PwdHash.
It depends on what you need, obviously.

I think Lucene or Sphinx will take you a lot of the way. I don't know about the others.
I'm not sure how to read this. Is this beinning of the end of blackberry?
This feels like the beginning of the end.
Everybody's Lying to You
Fair. However it's really hard to isolate the sarcasm because there's no real factual meat to the article.
Agreed. To get a feel for his style: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
Milky Way over Texas time lapse (video)
Many Angel Groups Have “Cheapened” the Reputation of Traditional Angel Investors
Good point. Don't sell the security. Focus on ease-of-use.
I remember seeing these same threads start to show up on Digg a few years ago.
Wow, 16 uses of "these same."
The Best Advice I have Received
Windows 7 adds native Virtual WiFi technology from Microsoft Research
>I want to be human again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest of you humans.

Communication technology exists to help satisfy the innate human desire and <em>need</em> to communicate. So it isn't reasonable to become anti-social to be human "again". Moderation and maybe a more sophisticated approach (letters maybe, I liked that in the article) is what we need.
Almost all of pylons' nice features come from it being built on some of the best python projects out there. Pylons itself isn't much more than glue, but as a packaged deal, it can't be beat.

That's my two cents anyway.
Duplicates appearing in HN top?
Hi,

I'm noticing duplicates appear on the top list of HN. I've got a screenshot if people need one but thought I'd post this in case someone who can fix this views 'new' postings.
Oops, looking into it.
I apologize for the moderate threadjack here, but I have a lot of respect for you guys and would like your opinion on something...

How do you feel about these sorts of things (openid, I mean). I remember microsoft trying it long long ago and it being a colossal failure. A good friend of mine and I have a little blog/news aggregator/comment pool thing that we're both having a bit of fun with and he keeps suggesting that we use google connect.

To me, these sorts of things take away from the community feel of places like HN, or reddit, or wherever else...

What do you guys think? Was this a good move for facebook?
I have captured the screen.
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/5545/duplicateposts.png
It's something pretty weird in the rendering code - given a top and a bottom copy, clicking on the bottom copy votes up the top copy.
That's quite true. I try not to fall under the spell of the selectivity bias.

I know a bunch of math grad students who competed in the IMO and the Putnam, and I know another (smaller) bunch of math grad students who despize math competitions. It's a matter of personality, I guess. Some are problem solvers, other are theory builders. We need both.

All in all, the point was that math competitions, per se, attract math "whiz kids". Hence, AoPS should be populated by, at least some, math "whiz kids".
Google Earth as game engine for ship simulator
PlanetInAction.com today released a free browser based ship simulator that is build around the Google Earth browser plugin. A very exciting show case for what can be achieved using the Google Earth API. A review and video can be found here http://www.gearthblog.com
Basically this article boils down to one central point: This isn't a downturn it's a correction so don't expect things to "bounce back".

My opinion is they're probably half right. I don't think anything is going to bounce back to where it was but I also think panic caused things to drop further than they needed to. So we'll probably see a small bounce eventually but from there it'll probably be a decade before we reach pre-bust levels.
The article didn't actually say very much at all about how well (or not well) you could live in India on $2 per day. I somehow feel even less enlightened than before.
I'd use a subdomain, because I like flexibility and because I don't give a shit about the SEO tricks du jour.
As you look into it, it would be pretty cool to know the steps you took.
A few cases that have occurred over the years:

1. Working with inherited code, one of the original programmers had an identifier I believed was "el" (short for "element") but that was actually "e1" (presumably short for "element 1"). You don't know frustration until your compiler tells you "undefined identifier 'el'" when, by all appearances, there's nothing wrong with your code. Not only did I waste a couple of hours on this, but the stress probably shortened my life by a few hours, too.

2. Embarrassingly enough: For reasons that I don't understand, I have on a couple of occasions typed a zero where I meant to type an uppercase 'O'. I shipped Python code that had a bug in it because I assigned a value to "box0ffset" instead of "boxOffset". The bug was thankfully minor, and I obviously must have been smoking crack to make this typo, but it has happened and could have been avoided if I'd been using a good font.

3. I've seen C code (I think in an open source project) where the programmer typed something along the lines of "100l". He probably meant to type "100L" and just missed the SHIFT key. By this time, I'd switched to a font that had an "l" that was clearly distinct from a "1", but I imagine that I would have otherwise been utterly perplexed.

These are probably not everyday examples. The circumstances in which confusion is possible are rare. But they do happen and are (in some sense) expensive. At the very least, it's a whole class of errors that's easily and cheaply avoided by choosing an attractive font that minimizes the opportunities for confusion. Why risk the frustration?
Looking at the health of both companies if it's the beginning of the end for either of them I'd say it's Yahoo. On that note this seems short sighted. With the smartphone market just gearing up I think it's foolish to focus on any one platform unless you absolutely have to.

(For the record I don't think either one is going anywhere soon, I'm just saying Yahoo's closer to a fall than Blackberry)
This infuriates me more than almost any other social faux pas. This, and people talking on their cellphone in the car. ESPECIALLY people talking on the cellphone in the car.

I have to turn the radio down, and I have to pretend that I'm not listening to your conversation. When you're finished, am I allowed to comment on what you were just talking about?

Here is an idea, if the two of us must share a dinner table, or a car, put your freaking phone on silent, you are not THAT important and neither is anybody else.

On another note, I am starting to believe that our generation is becoming culturally dead. I was recently at a "Rabbit in The Moon" show. Its a visual/audio spectacular/rave type of thing. Think big flame throwing half naked women, a guy in a giant hamster ball, and just general craziness.

YOu know what drove me absolutely, completely, positively insane? It wasn't the teenagers on ecstacy in their "cuddle puddles" or the half-naked dudes running around trying to sell me drugs, it was the morons in the front row more pre-occupied with trying to pop off a photo with their telephone than with the absolutely fantastic show they could have been witnessing.

WTF Is wrong with people? Is the crappy, grainy video with bad sound of the show that you can post on your myspace page so that your friends thing you're cool REALLY more important to you than actually EXPERIENCING what is going on around you?

Is that what it has become now? It isn't the experience, it is bragging about the experience to people on the internet.

It makes me sad :(.
"single Unix servers were household names and their admins and systems hackers were Gods"

Back in those days, akebono.stanford.edu was as famous as Britney Spears, Segways dominated the roads, and women outnumbered men in CS departments.
Kanye West Pleads Not Guilty | Hip Hop MVP
My thoughts exactly. It would have been interesting to hear the details of how someone in India would spend the $2 during the course of a day (or $14 during a week);
C-space, C-e, M-w. Three freaking commands.
-> it'll probably be a decade before we reach pre-bust levels.

How do you know?

The same people who didn't see it coming are all of a sudden experts on when it's going to end.
Wonder if this would work on App Engine.
Exclusive Leaked Screenshot Of Nokia’s Maemo Harmattan
Fox Television Tries To Crowdsource Cartoons Through Aniboom
I've actually wondered that myself, but I never find myself away from my Mac.
Yeah, you can do it in PHP, but the process for getting it to work includes banging your head on the table, getting drunk, and slitting your wrists.

I'll take Django, thanks.
Twitter to Launch Business Tools by Year-End
I like how Ars is able to make a complex topic more accessible. MS-based proteomics is still young, and it will take a few years for things to stabilize. RNA expression arrays were in much the same state several years ago. The key is to make sure that the variation comes from the biological samples, and perhaps the instrumentation, with the methods not being a source for those differences. Two things that the field needs to do is (a) make raw data available so that experiments can be reproduced and (b) uses consistent data formats. Standards can/will follow.

One experiment I would like to see is the same lab doing the same experiment multiple times on the same sample on different instruments (of the same make and model). Results should be interesting.
One optimization is to write big O notation in minimized form. It looks more impressive to write O(n).

And to try being helpful: do aggregation in the db where possible, be sure indexes are good, play around with the number of rows you process at a time, use joins if appropriate to minimize queries, if your queries are expensive at all use EXPLAIN, depending on the database, look into using a cursor (maybe?).
Thanks for taking the time to put that together. Please note, however, that I complained about Profont's lowercase L looking like a one, not about its zero. Also, the original article's rendering of Droid Sans Mono does not have a slashed zero. Is the original article in error or did you perhaps accidentally reuse Profont for the Droid Sans Mono sample?
Yeah, the title was simply meant to be eye-catching.
Not a bad idea. I would also like to know how this happened.
Here's a couple of interesting posts Linus wrote a few years ago summarizing some aspects of Git's history and design.

http://mid.gmane.org/Pine.LNX.4.64.0605050944200.3622@g5.osd...
http://mid.gmane.org/Pine.LNX.4.64.0610191258290.3962@g5.osd...
Crystal Meth
Resources and information on crystal meth addiction and treatment.
This is currently the hardest thing I'm battling in my life (As sad as that may sound)

On one hand I want to work hard after my fulltime job and read more programming books, write more open source software and write more to my programming blog

On the flip side I want to spend more time on my other passion (Cooking), more with my girlfriend, more time growing myself.

I'm working towards a half/half setup by so far cutting out freelance work from my life, but I think I still need to balance it out more.
Indeed. And the trolls were tenured PhDs.
What Microsoft offered was the Microsoft Passport->.NET Passport->Windows Live ID. The difference being that under their plan, Microsoft was the only provider. Big difference.

OpenID allows people to use whichever services they want as their OpenID providers.
The "visual tongue radar" (allows psuedo vision via an electrical impulse grid on the tongue) interface is intriguing. The reporter describes:

"Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them with my eyes."

This article reminds me of a 2003 story (that made the cover of Wired) about a prototype brain implant artificial vision system and its hopeful Canadian patient, Jens Naumann. Here's a link: http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/sight/story3.html.

Does anyone know the eventual outcome of Jen's story? I can't find any follow-up stories about him.

The tongue interface seems like a less invasive alternative to Jen's system; although, you probably can't speak while it's active.
For me, the study of algorithms is cs. Hacking is just a means of implementation. Also, I think it's a huge misconception that algorithms is all about math -- it's about problem solving in general.

As Dijkstra said "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
I forgot to swap them, sorry. Image in original post fixed.

However, I still don't find them too hard to distinguish, even without the / through the middle for Droid Sans or the 1 vs l in 11 or 12pt Profont.
0. View frontpage with horror. Remind self not to panic.

1. Back out latest release, which contained a bunch of
low-level changes, and restart the server.

2. Use the server repl to analyze what's happening. Notice that the problem is duplication in the list of
top stories, because its len
is 180 and len:dedup of it is 157. Fix the
immediate problem with

(zap dedup ranked-stories*)

Now
there are only 157 top stories, but no one will notice.

2. The list of top stories is kept in order by reinserting things
into it when they get upvoted. Hypothesis: this code is not
recognizing duplicates.

3. Here's the operator that does that:

(def reinsert-sorted (test elt seq)
(if (no seq)
(list elt)
(is elt (car seq))
(reinsert-sorted test elt (cdr seq))
(test elt (car seq))
(cons elt (rem elt seq))
(cons (car seq) (reinsert-sorted test elt (cdr seq)))))

4. The expression where it should get rid of duplicates is

(rem elt seq)

5. Why is that not working? Because I just stupidly expanded
the Arc testify operator to treat tables as tests, like
functions. What used to be

(def testify (x)
(if (isa x 'fn) x [is _ x]))

had become

(def testify (x)
(if (in (type x) 'fn 'table) x [is _ x]))

I thought I'd rarely want to find or remove a particular
table from a list. I'd be much more likely to want to use
one like a fn. Doh. I forgot all the items in News are tables.

6. Revert to old definition of testify, test on localhost, commit code, restart
server again.

7. Be really thankful that the problem was not some other much more frightening stuff we changed today, like the definition of atomic.
Could anyone please tell me the names of some companies/non-profits researching proteomic sequencing? Preferably ones trying to work out the kinks that the article references? I live in the Boston area and used to analyze genomic data for accuracy and consistency and would love to help with this problem.
Stop your CPU power from invisibly going down the drain | Eliminate False Sharing
Self-storage industries
Self-storage industries have grown popular in recent times. In the US alone, around 52,000 storage facilities had emerged by 2007 end. Today, the industry is known for its revenue returns of around $20 billion per year.
This is one of many reasons I wish Emacs lisp had a reasonable namespace mechanism, rather than just a somewhat haphazardly applied verb-noun naming convention. Copy/kill/yank/etc. commands could be collected, movement commands together, etc. (Even if only aliases.)

Emacs periodically surprises me by already having some minor function I wanted, but half the time it's only surprising because it's named something unusual (compared to both other programming environments and the rest of Emacs). I can never remember what the commands are called for "get (point) for beginning / end of line", just that they're named something I can't find by searching apropos with anything that comes to mind, so I use something like

(defun end-of-line-point ()
(save-excursion (end-of-line) (point)))

instead.

While, on the one hand, it's nice to be able to extend the editor so easily, solving the underlying problem wouldn't detract from its extensibility in any way. Sticking everything in one namespace also leads to function-with-unnecessarily-cumbersome-name syndrome. (C has the same problem, though.)

Maybe one of these days I'll quit whining and just write another editor, but any real competition to Emacs has a lot of functionality to match, and most of the other historical cruft is easy enough to tolerate.
It was in the title because many of the snooty programmers who think they're so much smarter than the .NET guys, and who go off and build overly-complicated things that don't work just for the sake of building something complicated, are in love with Ruby on Rails. It doesn't attack RoR so much as a subset of the RoR community.

It pretty much abstains from the topic of RoR as a language and framework.
I don't understand, are they upset that you can view cached versions of them?

Or are they upset other people are selling information for cheaper?
You can communicate allot to people before you bring them on board without disclosing while establishing sufficient mutual understanding to make the right decisions.

If you are a programmer, use the same mental models you use to explain your work to less experienced peers. Metaphors left and right.

What you don't want to do is tell them business direction, revenue models, any leads you might have, with who and their nature, and anything else that might be used to screw you over.

You can keep your secrets really well, as long as you're not soliciting VC money or cofounders. If you intend to pay people, even if deferred, you can look them in the eye, tell them what you did before and you will find plenty of people who will have faith in you.

I also found it really helpful not disclose the name/website of the company to anyone you're speaking with directly. Aside from all the obvious reasons why not, you could also come into contact with a chatty social non-business blogger-type person who will running his mouth.
Fit-PC2: smallest 6W Intel Atom PC
A huge number of people are vague and unfocused. Especially in comparison to some of the successful people he's worked with.

So this is not surprising to me. Most cold meetings are very bad. I've largely stopped taking cold meetings because of it.
How does this impression differ from your impression of other VCs?
No. He's focused and busy. He wants you to be focused and busy too.
Does anyone else think this scene from "Other People's Money" applies to Newspapers?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfL7STmWZ1c
Using something that's good and not trendy suggests intelligence. Using something that's good and trendy does not suggest anything meaningful.
I am... surprised. I live in a very high humidity location (cue ukuleles) and mass market paperbacks just disintegrate (literally in some cases; the glue denatures and they fall apart) and the pages yellow very quickly.

Trade paperbacks - it depends on the book, clearly the quality varies a lot.

Hardbacks, on the other hand, do quite well if you can keep the mold and the termites away.
This stuff isn't that tough guys. You lower taxes and you cut back on government and the economy expands and there is prosperity for all. When your policies go in the opposite direction you get what we are experiencing now.

Read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". It's all in there.
This is easily the single most important question a nascent organization faces. Get it wrong and every bad thing ever mentioned in a chain letter will happen to you and each of your collaborators, many times over.

(Honestly, I doubt it matters much, but blog. is my [slight] preference. In any event, it isn't difficult to make one redirect to the other, and it's wise to do so, whether the Google juice the other answerers mention is important to you or not.)
I'm getting the vibe (e.g. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/yahoo-mobile-abandons-i... ) that BB apps sell less than 10% of the iPhone apps. If this is anywhere close to reality noone will develop apps for BB...
Diana Hayden Wallpapers, Diana Hayden Photos, Diana Hayden Pictures Gallery
> This implies the community thinks they're best

In some cases, it just serves as a reminder about Stallman's incredible stubbornness. (transient-mark-mode, for one) The defaults are easy to change, at least.

Also, not to feed the trolls, but it seems like with Emacs vs. vim arguments, people are usually talking past each other. In general, it sounds like Emacs users are happy to have an easily extensible environment, and the vim users enjoy using such a terse and efficient text editor.

There's nothing contradictory there!

An editor could do both, there just hasn't been a sufficiently popular synthesis of their strong points, yet. (Right?)
Dobelle died a few years ago. The FDA would never give approval for the experimental surgeries so he ended up moving his operations to Portugal. There were only a handful of patients that ever had this procedure done, Jens and Cheri Robertson that I know of. Dobelle's company was supposed to provide life-long support for Jens and Robertson but that has ended. The company ran out of funding within the last 2 years. Cheri's equipment no longer works, and she had to send it to one of the technicians who helped design it personally to try and have it fixed. I'm not sure if that has ever happened.

Cheri has had continuous problems with the implants since they were done. Her's never healed correctly and she has constantly been leaking blood and brain fluids from one of the cortical shunts.

In a recent interview where Cheri met Jans in person, he has been having many problems with his implants over the years and is thinking about having another surgery to have it removed. His equipment had stopped working several years ago and was never repaired. Overall, he ultimately said he was disappointed with the entire thing and probably would not do it again. Cheri remain(ed|s) more optimistic, but currently there is no long-term plan for continued improvement or support for the patients that underwent this experiment.
OK, pardon the sarcasm here, but what exactly do you think the word "probably" means? Because to me it means "the author is stating an opinion and is in no way saying that opinion is authoritative"

In other words I don't "know", I never claimed to "know" so you shouldn't accuse me of it.

If you're going to go so far as to quote the line at least read it first and try to look at what the author's actual meaning was.

For the record I based my opinion on the simple fact that things around me shouldn't cost as much as they do. The house two doors down from me is 2 bedroom, needs a new roof and was still valued at $750,000. In my opinion a two bedroom house simply isn't worth that so I don't expect it to bounce back to that value.