skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask PG: What is the running-total (summation) of all our Karma as users of HN?
I had to ask.
Hulu in its current state wouldn't get my money, but if they allow users to view all seasons and episodes of a show then I'd gladly pay a monthly fee.
This reminds me of a quote by Thomas Jefferson, at the bottom of this page: http://books.google.com/books?id=VGYSAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA2... (Geez that's a long URL!) Basically it says that we shouldn't build our important buildings out of wood, because wood rots. If you want something to last more than 50-100 years, make it out of something more durable.
The point of the article is that, somewhat surprisingly, the body seems to use the reactive oxygen compounds released during exercise as a signal that the body should regulate its insulin sensitivity, so if you're exercising to help keep diabetes in check, taking antioxidants (which destroy them) is actually going to be cancel out those benefits.

As with most studies (particularly anything involving nutrition!), further studies will be necessary before there's a consensus on the specifics.
Ksplice wins $100,000 in MIT start-up contest
The analysis sounds suspect to me.

2. Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed. Then the fourth reading is averaged with the new average, and so on. There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings.

The code is computing an exponentially weighted mean. Read that last sentence of the quote again, the analysis has it backwards. The last sample carries more weight, not the first.

Now, type "uptime" at your unix prompt. Those last three values are computed the same way and have been for decades. (There are three different weighting factors used in them instead of the 1:1 implied in the text here.)

The exponentially weighted mean is useful when you care more about the most recent values and when processor resources are highly constrained. It may be what was intended, or maybe not. Generally you would use a weighting factor to make the earlier factors not fade into oblivion as fast as these do, but I'm not going to take the word of someone who can't correctly describe the algorithm in his report.

And the bit about turning off the illegal opcode interrupt... the premise is that some sort of failure would alter the program memory in such a way that one of the opcodes became illegal, yet the program would continue to function but produce erroneous results. I'd have to say the probability of this is vanishingly small, in fact, given valid opcode density for microprocessors, much smaller than an instruction being mutated to a legal opcode that somehow allowed the program to still run but produce erroneous results.

I guess I should complete with my doubts about 3. Just because the A/D reads 12 bits doesn't mean you have 12 bits of data. If the 8 low bits are noise there is no information loss in dividing by 256. You have to understand the machine to know if this is a problem.
LoseThos 64-bit Operating System V5.06 Released.  Not a UNIX.
How about starting a blog about how to find jobs in this market?

That'd no doubt be highly diggable and gather hits from all over the place. Then page rank goes up. then hits come in.
I'm part of the Scratch Team and it's great to see our project here on HN! I've been leading the development of the web site and I'd be curious if there are any HN volunteers who might be interested in contributing their expertise in this effort. We're particularly interested in people with experience in scaling up web applications or Linux experts that could help us iron out some of the issues we have with Scratch on that platform (Ubuntu specifically).
I (worldchanging author) Predict U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Peaked In 2007
6000$ for three seems kinda ouch. unless it's 6000 for 3 sets of 3 like the pictures (doubt it).
Project Management Certification
Want to bolster your PMP and other credentials with a new certification, and earn PMP PDUs in the process? Consider these great training options related to project management certification.
Computer Operating Properly interrupt: anyone else think this sounds like a National Semiconductor processor device? ISTR they had an interrupt labelled COP.

When was the last decade National made a processor, anyway?
Security Checks Reaching Towards Your Brain
There was an article here (sorry can't find it) that discussed pricing of subscription plans for software services. The conclusion was that monthly plans were significantly more popular than yearly, even though the cost was higher.
UFO?
(in reply to ram1024, whose comment seems to be dead)

Yup, the first comment mentions that you get ~12x the power from a ~2x more expensive, professionally-installed solar panel.

Still, it's a good start...
Did they invest so wisely?

Here's one case (and I'm sure there are others) which is a resounding no: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/europe/02norway.html
True..but since Naughty Dog's features were due to it being written in Lisp, wouldn't it have been better if Sony trained people in Lisp ?
Wall Street Opens Doors to Open Source Technologies by Wall Street & Technology
Map of 100 years of NYC subway ridership
When it comes to large, slow-moving beaurocracies, baby steps are a good thing. Generally the topics mentioned in the article are good first steps.
Ask HN: Good examples of user notifications in a client-side application?
I'm reworking an application right now, and one of the things that's really been bugging me is how notifications are being handled.

Validation errors and exceptions are being reported to the user by pop-up windows, and I think there's a better way to do it.

Do you have any examples of applications that handle notifying the user of validation errors / general errors very well?

This is a client-server application, not a web application; so that does complicate things slightly.

Also, this is a Windows app, so notifications via something like Growl aren't really viable.
http://blog.compete.com/where-do-these-numbers-come-from/
And the bit about turning off the illegal opcode interrupt

I agree with your other analysis, but I have to disagree here. One of the basic tenets of embedded systems design is that ALL interrupts should be handled, even if the handler is just to say "Hey I processed an interrupt that should never fire."

Given that a system in the wild can be subjected to conditions never encountered in an office or a lab (e.g., a police radio transmitting 2 inches away while this thing is measuring someone's Blood Alcohol Content) you simply can't predict how the processor will behave. That's why you make sure that things like the Watchdog and Illegal Instruction interrupts and resets are properly handled.

That this device took these shortcuts would immediately cause me to suspect the rest of the design. If I were the auditor (I would love to get into this kind of work, BTW), I'd start digging deeper right away.
1964 Antique Modem Live Demo
I have heard about 3-4 of them and haven't used any.

Since many of them seem to be social networking sites, I would like to point out that Orkut was and still is the biggest "web 2.0"/social networking site.

It'll be interesting to stack them up against Orkut for market share.
Google says it's resolved. Updates coming soon: http://twitter.com/google/status/1796948425
Kerlikowske presided over some real, substantial reforms in his previous job as Seattle Police Chief. It's not certain that he'll be able to do the same as part of the Obama administration, but at least his past record is good. Our local alternative weekly wrote an ambivalent editorial about this:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/good-luck-and-good-riddan...
federal authorities would no longer raid medical-marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states where voters have made medical marijuana legal.

Sounds substantive to me.
you could theoretically struggle to write C code to work like Erlang

Lots of people write non-blocking network servers in C (epoll, kqueue, etc -- libevent); that does not constitute "struggling to write C code that works like Erlang", but it still delivers a very high-performance end result.

C performs well, but can be unstable

C is perfectly "stable", it can just be hard to get right.
How one of the largest US public universities deploys Perl
Homogeneity makes it easier to build a governing consensus; people can believe there's an optimal policy benefiting everyone, "because we're all so alike", rather than a zero-sum contest between disparate groups.
It's way too early to be showing people the product. It is the timing of the demo that important.
Another one of those sites where you have to click through 20 pages to see them all. I was curious, but not that curious.
> (sum [karma _] (users))
1632636

This may be a slight undercount, because users are lazily
loaded. But most with significant karma would be loaded
at this point.
It's a myth with keywords in the domain name. You can use keyword subdomains and it worked just fine. My rule is that you should have at least one keyword in the URL. And the URL should not be longer than 15 words (incl. domain, subdomain, path)
Only if we all have to get them.
yes, but not everyone in the world currently has this set of things: [1] shelter,[2] food, [3] water. there are some things that are basic to our survival and experience, and from there we build the 'more.' when i think post scarcity, i think post-scarcity of life essentials. the quest to explore and build new things is infinite.
A good way of understanding the popularity of a website is google trend. This article on Techcrunch shows an example of obvious bad data with Hitwise (which can be applied to Alexa and Compete as well): http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/20/new-hitwise-stats-show-...

At the end of the day, everyone who owns a blog or a website (myself included) has been able to experience first hand how flawed the data from such companies are by simply comparing them with their own google analytics data :-)
This is why we are entrepreneurs. An awesome video.
So the user with the highest karma has ~2.6% of the total... interesting.
We've got a Twitter account, and a Facebook friend's page.

I've leaned against doing a blog for two reasons:
1) There are many other experts in this field who praise us & eclipse my knowledge (like http://jobsearch.about.com/)

2) Other job search engine blogs have been miserable failures, based on number of comments & attention they've failed to attract (like http://blog.indeed.com/, http://blog.simplyhired.com/, http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog/ and http://monster.typepad.com/)
Funny he implies the bundling of IE in every copy of Windows and the threats against OEMs who thought about bundling any other browser had nothing to do with the failure of Netscape.

He doesn't just imply it - he says it explicitly in another article of his [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000074.html]:

"When Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0, fast on the heels of IE 2.0, it was shocking just how good a job they had done. Not only did they replicate every feature in Netscape's browser, but they added some more features too, and did it all with an architecture that was robust and strategic. While it is true that Microsoft used its operating system to help push its browser, it is also true that they just wouldn't have gotten away with this if their browser wasn't great. (Case in point: even though Windows out of the box can play MP3 files, everyone I know uses WinAmp, not the Windows Media Player, to listen to them. Even though MSN is on the desktop, everybody uses AOL. Back when the browser integrated with Windows was crap, Netscape had 80% market share. So please stop fretting about the power of bundling.)"

And moreover, he's correct.
More Teens Say They Like Their Parents (in Canada)
Maybe 'classic' users should be shown the classic leaderboard by default?

Alternatively, maybe classic users have the same preferences, but check the site less frequently... so they follow the newer population but at a lag.
I would like to see things from your point of view, but I can't get my head that far up my ass.
The submitted article suggests the failure is an AT&T failure.
Two Eggs and a Kidney: Regional World Cities
It seems to just be a mash-up of a few RSS feeds? Is there anything above and beyond that or is that it?

If that is it, what are we supposed to comment on? the design?
Usually the combination that I have been using for the events that I have planned, has been eventbright with pathable.com

Eventbright handles a lot of the registration problems very well. Although it falls down in the following areas, Paypal sucks natch, and it doesn't handle individuals buying more than one ticket well at all. i.e. 1 person buys 5 tickets for people at their company. All of the tickets belong to that person even if you want all of the different peoples names. The google checkout is a bit better than the paypal nightmare.

Pathable is really great, because it can pull the xml feed of your attendees out of eventbright, and has a lot of community features for your attendees. It sets up groups, lets people self tag their interests, handles emails between the people attending and really helps you establish a community between the people coming to your event.

Pathable also lets you print out fancy looking name badges with peoples names on them, and the names of people that they should talk to at the event (as an option). Anyway Pathable is good stuff.
Are you sure you can't guess the wifi device admin password and fix it yourself? (You might be surprised.)
The Tesla Model S - Touch-Screen User Experience using Merapi Project
There is an effort[1] to create a SICP language inside PLT.

The docs say it's not yet ready for the masses, but the author was asking for feedback[2] some time ago, so I guess it's good enough to start working.

[1] http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-plt/

[2] http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/browse_threa...
Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606747
The google group is still active: http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-news-reads-sicp

Next meeting is on May 24, covering the end of chapter 2, exercises 2.73 - 2.97.

Here's the log from the last meeting: http://inimino.org/~inimino/projects/2009/SICP/logs/20090510
Most of us aren't accredited investors, so we can't buy stock in small companies without starting them, working for them, or being related to the founders.

What is the reasoning behind preventing people from investing into companies? Is it just to keep people from being swindled? It seems off to me.
Googlefail? :) http://www.roomatic.com/%23googlefail
Though I don't see why an article about mysql forking wouldn't mention Drizzle, I think the writer was using forks as a verb.
While I am for software transparency when it matters, I do have to say I'm much less excited about the software being gone over by lawyers (or programmers in the pay of lawyers).

Give me a page of C code, and I can find ten faults. I can complain about variable naming schemes, I can complain about indentation I don't like. I can complain even if it's actually my preferred indentation, because you won't even know better. I can always complain about architecture because there are always pros and cons, which means I can play up the cons and ignore the pros, along with ignoring the fact that we have to use some architecture and "perfect" was never on the table. I can say this other architecture should have been used instead, and get you involved in a battle of pro and con analysis that is a perfectly good engineering discussion but will sound like dissembling on the witness stand. I can complain about the bug fix for an issue that I can't imagine how it comes up, but came up in testing. I can, basically, complain all day long, even if it is literally the best C code ever written.

Now, I grant that history suggests I'm unlikely to encounter the best C code ever written in one of these contexts, but my point is that since nothing can survive lawyer scrutiny, lawyer scrutiny is actually information-free.

The solution to "Not having any software standards" can't be "Requiring absolute, unattainable perfection", because the only sane response to that is to stop writing software.

The real question is not "Is this software perfect?", but "Did it function correctly?" And I'd be a lot more comfortable if somebody took the source code and the hardware and actually showed a case where it is wrong by physically producing that case, and not just theorizing about how the software might go wrong.

All that said, for all I know this thing's a pile of crap. Certainly if I had to lay money, that's the way I'd bet. My point is more that this writeup doesn't meet my standard for determining that it's a pile of crap, and as much fun as it may be to pile on law enforcement, if the price is letting the "lawyerly-perfection" standard pass without comment, that price is not worth paying!
- As kyro said, it's a bit too wide.

- The logo could stand to be a bit crisper. Maybe take a look at some of the techniques from http://psd.tutsplus.com/designing-tutorials/elements-of-grea...

- I'm kinda stupid, but I didn't realize the scroll bars were scroll bars until I saw someone else's comment. Also frustrating that they seem to work with mousewheel only.

- As azrealus said, it looks strange while you're loading up. I'd hide everything until it's all loaded and show it at once.

Good start, keep it up.
The article looks at both viewpoints. Personally, I think we are aways down the path of augmentation with cell phones and laptops. I dont see any great divide coming. Just like everything else there will be early adopters and late adopters. Eventually everyone will have the choice. Again, think cell phones. It's not going to be a race war between humans and super humans.
Programming magic: Rituals and habits of effective programmers
Slightly related question:
Is it possible to separate the karma from comments from karma earned from posts? I'd imagine most users earn their karma from one or the other and rarely both.
This is exactly one of the problems. People downvote because it is how they feel not because there is any logic to it. Unless the negative points reaches threshold, it is suspect. Downvoting should also consist of a comment as to why. When a professor marks your paper wrong, does he not place things on it like "W.C." and so on? How are people supposed to learn from their mistakes if they think what they wrote was reasonable yet some HN user comes along, misunderstands what was written, and just votes it down?
The design is pretty clean. Nice use of fonts. I was asking myself what the gray horizontal bar under the menu is for. It seems like a horizontal scrollbar to me but it does not respond to dragging (FF3/mac). And i would place the logo URL Flux to the left hand, instead of right. Because that's more standard.

I like it.

EDIT : I made a quick image for you (i also shifted the content a bit to the right) : http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/825545/urlflux.gif
Google Gets Its Own Fail Whale
If you look at the chart, you can kind of see that the percentage of users in the past 12 months decreases with potency and risk of the drug.

marijuana (10%), cocaine (2.3%), meth (0.5%), and heroin (0.1%)

I'm curious though, why more people use Meth than Heroin, but fewer seek treatment. 23x more people have used cocaine as have used heroin, yet the same number seek treatment for marijuana, cocaine and heroin. What is that about I wonder...
Agreed. If Les Paul was 60 years younger, he'd have been into computers, no doubt. He's very much the image of the hacker mentality. I love seeing the inventive mind at work, even if it's in another field.
This place has no sense of humor! It's funny, I'll up you.
Worst data visualization I've seen all day.
What can reality TV teach us about clinical drug trials?
But one of Joel's points is that, by the time you get around to rewriting something, you usually aren't dealing with the same programmers.

If this isn't the case, and you have the same core team available, then I agree, it is sometimes better to rewrite. But these days, refactoring techniques and testing methodologies are much more concretely defined and practice, so it still may be possible to essentially "rewrite" the code without having an X year shipping delay.
Since when HN is a "Google is down" alert system?
A Passion For Your Craft
Creating realiable, scalable, and useable software takes skill that is developed over many years of practice, study, and most importantly: failure. When you move on, where does all this experience go?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=609200
Boston Celtics vs Orlando Magic Live Streaming NBA 2009 Match online for free
It's good to see that you've done your research, but I wouldn't discard the blogging route just because of those examples (so long as you have a good writer on your team).

Looking at the examples you gave, and tearing them down one by one:

http://blog.indeed.com/ - fairly basic design, and all the articles seem to be about themselves.

http://blog.simplyhired.com/ - again, mostly self-serving and/or random articles... "2009 Simply Hired Nugget Bowl"?? Who cares.

http://www.careerbuilder.com/jobseeker/blog - better content, but terrible design. It's painful to even look at, let alone read.

http://monster.typepad.com/ - better content again, but mostly ultra-short articles.

None of those are blogs that anyone sensible would read regularly, because they mostly regurgitate fairly boring or self-serving points without any new, useful ideas, and they're badly designed.

By "doing a blog" I don't mean doing a blog about you or about your business. I mean doing a blog about the topic that your business is related to, and making a genuine effort to write thoughtful articles that will influence the industry positively and/or be of interest to your target market.

I'd like to give our blog (http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/) as an example, but it's a little bit shambolic at the moment. Yet even so, the "thought leadership" articles we posted there generate some good hits and have generated some very good leads for us. Importantly, they've also massively upped our pagerank (because we run it on the same domain rather than a subdomain), which means, for example, that woobius comes up on the first page of results already for, for example, "construction collaboration".

So there's multiple benefits to creating a good blog. Of course, creating a good blog is hard, but if you can, imho, it's worth it. Whether you can is a function of whether you have interesting ideas about your industry (you probably do) and whether you have a good writer on your team who can write those in a clear, blog-friendly shape.
Mixcloud invites for Hacker News
We've just launched our private beta at http://www.mixcloud.com and we're looking for beta testers. If you'd like to try it out, please sign up with invite code: hackernewscloud

The idea behind Mixcloud is to connect independent radio content to listeners - a "YouTube of radio". We'd be very grateful for any constructive criticism via the feedback tab or simply feedback AT mixcloud DOT com.

You might recognise a couple YC-ers on the site (we're good friends with the guys from Songkick, Fuzzwich, Webmynd, Muxtape, Heyzap...)

On a related note, we were one of many young companies who didn't make it onto YC last year, so we'd like to take this chance to encourage everyone to keep building - whether or not you get on the program.

All the best,

Nico and Nikhil
andresmh, I don't see any contact info when I click on your username. Can you put your email address there?
The write-up didn't fill me with confidence but their website actually has a more technical take on things.

It seems to be (atleast initially) a way of updating the Linux kernel without rebooting.

http://www.ksplice.com/