skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a weight loss website. While most people arrive at my site with queries like "calories in apple pie", a significant number of people use queries like "how many calories do i burn by doing the dishes?" I never see double quotes or +/- signs in the queries.
Hey, that's a bit harsh. He's a blogger, not a programmer.
PixelCity procedurally generated city screensaver ported to OSX
That blog post was (in a way) persuasive...

It was substantially more difficult to read than it would have been had it been properly capitalized. I am now convinced that capitalization is not obsolete.
No performance comparison with their working C code. Hrmph. Erlang's a better choice for this kind of thing because you don't have to worry about a lot of the things that could go wrong in the C version, and it's a bit higher level than C, but still... C is fast and working code is working code.
Ask HN: Quick Graphic Mockup?
Does anyone know of an artistically talented friend who'd be willing to do a quick mockup of a small logo gratis (or for a very small fee)? I made what I want in Gimp, but I lack the artistic skill or the funds to develop it further. If it matters, it's just simple text with two colors. I'm jut having trouble with getting the shading and alignment exactly right.

My contact information is in my profile.
Whenever I visit justin.tv I get a "blocking a popup from justin.tv" notice on FF bar. At work w/o the popup blocker it opens a poker popup.

I seem to recall it is just some pages though - I will dig out a screeny.

EDIT: voila: http://screencast.com/t/rP72HQ0UG
I understand that idea, I am just worried about the cases where the nurses fail to recognize a serious condition. Of course that could happen to a doctor, too, but overall, I imagine it to be a very upsetting situation if you really feel like you want to see a doctor, but your way is blocked by a nurse.

What does the market say anyway? Do people want cheap nurses as an alternative to doctors? If so, I guess it would be fine, just let people choose where they want to go. But that is not necessarily what is happening. For example in Germany (very different system probably), the insurance company makes the rules about the kind of treatments they allow you.
Impressive technology, BUT...
I've just tried Wolfram Alpha with a preview account, and I have to express my complete disappointment. It seems to me that Wolfram Alpha is a classic example of geeks building application that is useful for them but that is irrelevant to the other 99% of the world. And that 99% are the buying customers.
I tried some usual web search phrases, and for each of them "Wolfram wasn't sure what to do with my data". It even suggested some alternative searches, but when I clicked, it still wasn't sure.
Of course, it was happy to analyse some sinus function for me, but imagine how many people would like that?
In my opinion, Wolfram will be an excellent niche search engine for mathematicians, statisticians, and the geeks alike, but nothing near Google in any respect.
my main point is that it is the "understanding" idea that WA is being presented as (either by Wolfram or the media I dont know). It obviously isnt: so people will get confused...
This is a blog that is aimed at programmers, right? Good programmers, that even like their profession enough to read blogs about it. But the entry reads like it is written for some "introduction to computers" blog instead. Surely this is not new or shocking information to any programmer in 2009?
In a real world situation people's reactions might have been different. I guess it is just easy to interpret different things into a written account of the interview (like "arrogance").
The Realxtend Branding Challenge
Won't this just lead to businesses changing their organizational structure, then carrying on as before? For example, instead of creating departments in a big company, one could split it into several smaller companies. (I don't really know the tax law in question, but it sounds like a potential loophole).
Wakoopa now has Linux support
Since this is only about making it easier for the writer, there are any number of ways to have your writing auto-capitalized.
This makes no sense to me, even when I've seen it before.

I'm the classic saver. I'm the individual who they want to spend more right now.

I'm saving because it's not a certainty that my contract will be renewed right now. I could very well end up living off the savings I'm accumulating right now.

If you reduce my payroll tax, I won't spend more. I'll save more.
___

If someone is unemployed, reducing the payroll tax is not going to change anything.

If someone is insecurely employed, they aren't going to change their spending habits, they will change their savings habits. There is no gain. That's most everyone right now!

Further, why is it going to help for me to buy more Saudi, Mexican, and Venezuelan gas, or buy more Chinese goods? It seems to me that providing a sales tax break for goods and services originated in the United States would provide a much better economic lift. (I don't know if this would be legal, however.)
Exactly.

A lot of so called "browser problems" are actually website problems.

And who's the genius that decided accepting malformed html was a good idea? If the first browsers gave an error (with line numbers and explanations) instead of trying to render incorrect html people would just go back and fix it.
"""
A much faster solution would be the same approach rsync takes with its "rolling checksum."
"""

I know this function is attributed to Bernstein and it's called Bernstein hash [0]. You're describing the Rabin-Karp string matching algorithm [1].

[0] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_de_hachage#Fonction_de_Ha...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabin-Karp_string_search_algori...
So I've made this iPhone game..
It's simple and a lot of fun; based on the Japanese game show Silent Library. It started out as a game for me and some of my friends who are fans of the show, but after several parties where everyone wanted to play when we got started I decided to take the app to the App Store. It has sold 5 copies in as many days... Any tips on how I can market this app? Any success stories amongst the news.ycombinator readers?

URL with more info about the game: http://www.innernode.com/iphone_silent_library.html

Cheers from Norway
So if you own a small biz(with or without partners), the gains you realise from it are tax exempted, if you put the gains back into the company and take it after 5 years. Is that right?
I feel compelled to mention that you could just use a language with a proper numeric tower.

If the numbers that you input to an algorithm are exact, you get an exact answer. If they are inexact, you get an inexact answer. 399 999 999 999 999 is an exact number.

guile> (- 399999999999 399999999998)
$1 = 1
Can you elaborate on that please.
Clean water, improved healthcare, ..., the internet are all modern innovations, however, I think they are worth keeping.

Just because we survived without something in the past, doesn't mean it isn't something worth fighting for.
I have to say, I don't really think Erlang is suitable for front-end stuff. Its string handling is just not good enough for the most common web tasks.

Also, this smells a lot like .Net's datatables etc., which go against modern front-end best practices.
Top tips from CFOs who raised funding in 2009
I've just tried Wolfram and I would say that Wolfram is to Google as a Statistics section in a library is to Google. In other words, nobody except geeks will care.
~$ sbcl

* (- 399999999999999 399999999999998)

1

* (- 12.52 12.51)

0.010000229

* (* 850 77.1)

65535.0
I wouldn't think so, because this applies only to capital gains tax, i.e. only becomes relevant when the company is sold.
I don't think there would be any advantage in transforming departments into separate companies, and then cayying on as before..
play a game with your friends, upload to youtube, hilarity ensues.
The twitter API gives access to a large number of a user's latest tweets. So it's a series of 140 characters which makes the gender classifier more accurate.
Sony Ericsson W302 at unlockcell.com
Sony Ericsson W302 Sometimes all you need is a phone that performs simply and simply performs. The W302 clears the path as an example of a phone that knows how to engage the user without hassle.
Silent Library is probably the least exciting name for an App ever. You need to play up the naughty/dangerous/outrageous angle.
Another intriguing possibility is to represent all required numbers exactly, even sqrt(2). It is possible with lazy evaluation: essentially a number is represented by a function that computes the digits of its decimal expansion, and arithmetic operations take two functions and return a third. Inefficient but mind-blowing.
MISTAKES THAT YOU SHOULD AVOID WITH WORK AT HOME OPPORTUNITIES
With the advent of internet, the entire dynamics of working culture has changed drastically. You no longer have venture out to go to office for your regular 9 to 5 job. Just enroll for a home job on the internet and make a living out of it. This is not just a fantasy but is happening in reality. There is plenty of work at home jobs available on the internet. However not all of them are genuine or will help you sustain for longer periods. It is so easy to commit mistakes in work at home related jobs.
Maybe they integrated that bias into their system?
And in python it takes 8 lines:

import wrapper
ts = wrapper.Twitter()
user = 'scorpion032'
diff= set(ts.friends.ids(screen_name=user)) - set(ts.followers.ids(screen_name=user))
for i in diff:
try: non_fol1 = ts.users.show(id=i)
except: continue
print "%s with %d followers and %d following" %(non_fol1['name'],non_fol1['followers_count'],non_fol1['friends_count'])
I've taught a lot of people the basics of HTML. Always started the same: open a text file, type in "Hello World", save as .html, open in browser, see Hello World. Woohoo, instant rush, this stuff isn't so complex after all. Don't want to see this:

Error at line 1, DOCTYPE expected
Researchers are determining whether consciousness is a by-product of brain activity. Projects like blue brain aim to make this question something we can answer.

Can you expand on what assumptions we make that are in no way provable?
As an animator, this happens to me often - even if the stuff is good!

After you view something for hours on end, your mind become numb to the nuances that make it great. On a tight deadline there isn't always the luxury to actually get away from it. My solution is to look at some work of other animators that inspire me - but only for a couple of minutes - then go back to my animation and prepare myself for the "Single Viewing Moment of Truth". I get one or two truly objective viewings of it until my mind slips back into the abyss, so I keep my pen in hand ready to scribble notes about what I see.
Well, that looks beautiful, but unfortunately it doesn't work for me on this MBP : /

Weird, because my usual SS, Electropaint, is also OpenGL and works fine. Oh well.

UPDATE: oh, it does work, but it crashed System Prefs (was using over 1G when i killed it). After that it runs fine, but I think it will look best on a Mac Pro : D
I'm more interested in whether reality pays heed to business plans... did Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Xerox, HP, Ford, Bell, Edison have business plans? Is there a correlation? Or maybe an inverse one?

The article seems to be saying that a "business plan" can help you see what the competitive landscape is at the moment. So it's not so much a "plan" for the future, but a picture of reality now.

It's similar to how I've started solving coding problems: to write down what the things are. This is not itself the solution, but it helps me to see clearly by removing so many factors, and then I can come up with a solution. I think it has a similar basis to what Fred Brooks said about complexity being easier to understand when represented as tables (objects, structs) than as flowcharts (code).
It's not terribly well tested yet, so any feedback would be useful.

What video card do you have, and do you get any useful debuggning info when it doesn't work? (in other words, does it crash or is it just blank)

[edit: a memory leak sounds nasty. I'll investigate.]
This isn't math, this is arithmetic. Computers are actually pretty good as math assistants - I refer to packages such as Maple, Reduce and similar - but what he's talking about is arithmetic. And programming arithmetic can be hard too.

It's like someone you know saying they program, and then you discover they write HTML, and know nothing about PHP, Perl, Python, JavaScript, <insert your favorite language here>. Programmers snort derisively about such sweeping ignorance, and then do the same thing in other fields by calling sums like 399999999999 - 399999999998 "math".

It isn't. Not to those who do, or have done, real math, any more than HTML hacking is "programming", and all "hacking" is breaking into banks and defacing web sites.

If you really care about getting your arithmetic right it's possible, but it's hard. Here's a challenge: write a program that takes three floating point numbers and returns their sum. I'll bet you can't get it right.
This article has not dated well at all. Compare IE's security track record with, er, just about any other browser and it's clear that sometimes throwing away a teetering house of cards and starting again is absolutely the best thing to do.
Can we ever prove that someone or something is conscious and not just mimicking consciousness extremely well?
Lisp as a game server
Will Linux Survive on Netbooks?
It's interesting to look back on this classic JoS article, with the perspective that Mozilla's rewrite-from-scratch basically kept the organisation around long enough for Firefox to come along, and look where that went. If Netscape hadn't made the decision to rewrite, they'd have released a browser even less well-suited for the then-modern Internet than Netscape 4 was when it came out, they'd have sunk even quicker, and there would have been nothing worth salvaging from the corpse - no Mozilla Foundation, no Suite, and ultimately no Firefox.
"A mind is like a parachute. Just because it needs to be open doesn't mean you should carve a gaping hole into it"
Yeah, exactly... I either am proud to take ownership of what I write, or it's just nasty stuff that I might tell a friend over a glass of "rosso", but that doesn't need to be written down and saved on the net.
There's no difference.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombies.html
an enormous challenge -- create a programming language better than Java

LOL!
It's a delicate point, because on this one Joel is both right and wrong, depending on the circumstances. He's absolutely right that the "Big Rewrite" is a very dangerous proposition that should be assessed very carefully, but sometimes, it is the right choice.

I'll agree that in 95% of the cases it's not the right choice, though. We programmers do love us a good rewrite, even when it's bad for us. Incidentally, the Mozilla rewrite was probably in the 5% where it did make sense.
You tell me the experiment that would show that consciousness is a by-product of brain activity and I'll tell you the assumption.

Blue Brain is a great project and will hopefully lead to many surprising discoveries, however how will it help us distinguish between a truly conscious entity and one that merely acts conscious?
definitely not going for gossip on this. trying to stay closely to stuff that is intellectually gratifying. i'm actually not interested in gossip rag stuff at all, please don't send that.
P.S. we're looking for a salesperson or general 'business guy'. http://www.dabbleboard.com/join has a somewhat generic description. Willing to consider arrangements ranging from market-level salary to cofounder levels of equity; ideally something in the middle.
The new calculator uses arbitrary-precision arithmetic, I think.
If it's intellectually gratifying, why should it be anonymous? There are very few things that I can think of where that would make sense, and most of them would be research into 'politically correct' territory; i.e. definitely not hacker stuff.

Interesting idea, but it just doesn't work for me...
I can reproduce the problem - simply open Sys Prefs and view the screen saver page. The small-window demo will start running, SP is using about 110M RAM. If I hit test and cancel it, though, memory use jumps ~200M, and then again, and then again - I don't think it's being killed correctly. It's not running (ie, CPU is not going nuts), but the memory isn't being released.

It actually seems to work fine, just I have a lot of things open and the system was probably just starved for RAM. Outside of Sys Prefs it works perfectly and performance is pretty good if I turn off bloom filter!

Currently on an older MBP, Radeon X1600, intel of course, 10.5.6.

Thanks for the great job, looks fantastic!

PS I'm happy to help debug if you can't reproduce, just let me know if you want to be sent some logs or whatever.
If there is no practical difference between artificial and real consciousness, the simplest answer is to conclude that consciousness derives from a specific neuron structure.
The Plan 9 crew had another run-in with Stallman later on, and much to our (the Plan9 users and devs) this one worked out in the favour of FOSS

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/plan-nine.html

The wave of FOSS came at just the wrong time for Plan 9. Lucent had bought the Labs and were losing money hand over fist in the tech crunch, they were taking out alternate light bulbs in the Labs building to save money! Lucent's lawyers were unhappy about removing the restrictions (you could modify the kernel source for your project but had to submit your changes upstream to Lucent - crazy clause!).

The corp name over the door changed to Alcatel / Lucent. The team was let go - mostly to Google (where Pike is now).

http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/plan9/curse_of_glenda.html

Still, Plan 9 From Bell Labs lives on, even with its patents copied into Linux (private namespaces). We'll wait for Oracle to use them for MySQL and raise the submarine!!
it could just be something different. i know of engineers who can't fathom the idea of pitching their idea to an investor, let alone writing something that might be a great read but they don't want it to be associated with their name on a google search for whatever reason.
Watch news
Latest industry news regarding everything to do with watches. Includes information on brands such as Timex, Wenger, Tissot and Citizen.
Actually, such a standard exists: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.1.2.

I think Opera is (or was) the only browser to support this.
Yes, but that's not very geeky.

More seriously: I'd like to specify only a comparision function.
If I understand well, the client browser polls the server, via JS timers. There is no practical, scalable way for the server to update the client browser, so the client has to poll this way. Their code just answers these polls.

Of course, performance wise, this sucks badly, because most of the time polling returns no results.
didn't they do that on one of the mac os versions too? and it turned out to be one of the best choices jobs claims he made?
I would presume the Erlang version is much smaller than the C version. Nobody argues that Erlang is faster than C, but it might be fast enough for the task at hand.

Functional programs tend to be slower than imperative programs. They also tend to be much smaller. And they tend to be easier to understand and work with once the programmer gets the right mindset.

This just shows another area where C is not the only competitor anymore.
I do have another account where I made one particularly hilarious comment that I didn't want associated with my main pseudonym. The username for that account should be fairly obvious, but if you want to guess please do it via email.
I totally disagree — the iPhone isn't that great of a phone without 3rd party apps. I mean, it has an awesome browser and such, but I cant imagine owning a phone which didn't have a big 3rd party ecosystem behind it.
I hate that!!!!!! It's one of my myriad pet peeves!!!!!!! Along wif spellen like ur a morun, wevver it's on perpose or not!!!!! It makes you look like a drama queen!!!!!!! Which, to me at least, is a huge insult!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And it's some inane piece of misspelled, new-age bullshit far too often!!!!!!! Shock!!! Horror!!!!!!! Shock!!!!! Horror!!!!!!!! <slap>

Sorry. Has anyone built the total perspective vortex yet?
ASP.NET Ajax AutoComplete tutorials
Yes, OS X, but they started with FreeBSD so it doesn't quite count.
ASP.NET tutorials
Great read, but irrelevant. The difficulty here is in determining what it means to "act conscious". We can agree that consciousness exerts influence on the world without knowing how to measure that influence exactly.
This sounds like mysticism wrapped up in psychology. If there is no measurable difference between two "beings", one a copy of the other but implemented in silicon, what would your conclusion be? Surely if consciousness is anything magical this will be impossible.
Hum, I think:

Special discounts: We lower the price if you buy more than X amount.
This: We lower the price if you buy more than X amount, and don't buy from the competition.
Well it's a group effort - and when people get into it, it's hilarious. I've placed it into the Entertainment category rather than the Game category. Maybe that will help...
Whether it fits HN or not, thanks for this.

The photo where Les Paul is holding his guitar fresh off the assembly line brought a tear to my eye. It just captures the pride and excitement.

Glad to hear the old man is still rocking.
How To Photograph The Whole Cathedral In One Photo
This looks pretty good -- I'm not sure what kind of event I'd want in 5 years to exit from a bootstrapped company, but having more options is always great.

The cynic in me thinks that Obama recognizes startups and small businesses will be the only bright points in the economy, so he wants to do something to make it appear he helped them, or possibly even was the primary reason for their success, by the time 2012 rolls around. However, wanting to be on the winning team isn't a bad thing in public policy.
The actual tax code defines "PSC" professional services corporations as described in the above summary, so I assume the implementation of this policy will just exempt PSCs by name.
Design and build service-oriented solutions using BizTalk Server 2009
Incredible news somehow. Users really liked using Windows better than Ubuntu?
A sales tax break for goods originating from US is, in all ways, a trade barrier. You can expect global mutual treatment. That means decreased foreign demand for US products.

So you end up sponsoring US companies that were not capable to compete with more efficient foreign companies. Which is in itself a more interesting problem. Most European countries have as high, or higher, standard in working conditions (and TAXES!) and they do have positive trade balance.

Does it really seem like a wise decision to make US produced products less attractive on the global market, for the hope that tax cuts on domestic products will match up, and then some, with increased income tax from the new jobs?

An alternative is to instead use taxes to set up better public transport, so the time-and-cost-to-get-to-work radius around companies increase. Making it both easier to find the right competence (larger area, more people to chose from) and making more real estate close (time-wise) to the city, making the cost of living lower.
It does count, they may have started with FreeBSD but they also had to write/rewrite a ton of stuff and throw away APIs and introduce new ones. I think the FreeBSD code is only a tiny (but critical) part of OSX