skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is one of Parkinson’s Laws: "perfection of planned layout is only achieved by institutions on the point of collapse."

In the chapter "Plans and Plants" of "Parkinson's Law" (see http://www.amazon.com/Parkinsons-Law-Cyril-Northcote-Parkins... ) he makes the point that

"During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death."

Parkinson reviews a number of headquarters buildings: League of Nations, Pentagon, St. Peter’s Basilica, Versailles,.... He concludes that their completion marked the sunset of the organizations that they were intended to house.
On a monetary basis, Yes.
"If the mechanisms to restrict access were in place the CouchDB backend could be exposed to the browser directly, removing the server side application code as a bottleneck."

Never, EVER expose a database to a client! Doesn't matter what types of controls you think you have, you must ALWAYS have some business logic in place to protect the data.
Cursing aside, this is very much a reality.
Which probably led to the googlage which resulted in the NYT getting in touch.
Ask HN: Are Sports Sites Outdated or Am I Not the Audience?
Major sites like espn.com and foxsports.com are ugly and too busy for me. Minor sites I've come across are similar.

What's the reason for this? Is it just me? Does the nature of their content force them to present information this way? Are there other knowledge areas with similar requirements to which I can compare them?
Wizards and GUIs (for the most part) only allow the user to perform operations that the developers have anticipated.

The beauty of interacting with the computer through the command line -- the shell or some other programmable interface -- is that you can do things that no one else has thought of before. You can write any program that is expressible in the language you use or string together the input and output of any program on your machine.

Buttons are nice, but sometimes you just need to be more expressive than that. When this mode of interaction is necessary, I find that the Unix way has a lot to offer.
Scaling twitter would have been relatively easy using Erlang, because it has all the hard parts solved as basic features of the language. They decided to go fishing instead.

Anyone doing this over without a point to prove would start with http://www.rabbitmq.com/
Wolfram Alpha: Watch the launch live @ 7pm CDT (video)
How do you define advanced? The whole 'animals' don't use tools seems to have been decimated by repeated findings over the last decade, the 'advanced' proviso is new to me.

Objectivism flows on from the idea that humans are self interested, that there is glory to be gained from achievement, that achievement is provision of something of unique value, and that money is the symbol of that unique value.

Though the language can be somewhat blunt, it's objectivism that holds dear the uniqueness you are awarded for providing in a successful startup, versus the hackneyed socialist 'money is the root of all evil' credo.
The solution has been pointed out hundreds of years ago, that is, the people need to reform. The hardware (factories, buildings, businesses, investments, machines...) are all there, the software (human minds) isn't up to speed.

I am no historian or economist, but I will suggest that perhaps the States had the "protestant work ethic", and that the Japanese had "loyalty to manager, company, and country."

The Chinese have neither; in a country that went from Corrupt and Dying Monarchy to War to Communist Revolution to Rapid Modernization, Materialism and Capitalism in a hundred years, the Chinese are still searching for a culturally unifying identity. Esp the last 50 years has been cut-throat, sell-your-mother-to-prosper survival mode, and the way businesses are run now reflect this. When the people feel more in control, feel ownership of their lives, they will start to feel more responsible towards themselves, their families, and to their communities.

I don't know, that's just what I think/hope. Anyone else?
I'm not kiba, but I share those sentiments. Nevertheless, I do pay for things in some cases. I paid for OS X, for example. Long ago, I paid for copies of SuSE and RedHat.

The principle that sharing is not theft is much deeper and more important than whether I downloaded from iTunes or thepiratebay. If we don't get past this, the future will be mostly reinvention of the past, in the manner of GNU reimplementing Unix.

We need to move to a culture where content creators understand that it's up to them to charge for content directly, and that they cannot control what people do with that content once they've sold it.
The Truth About The Early Days of Digg
Logical Innovation Wins MIT's $100K: Ksplice, Global Cycle
I was looking for info on the opposite effect, lower metabolism from crash dieting earlier today and couldn't find anything useful. However, using the term RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate) from your link I found far more interesting stuff.

The short version: yes crash dieting can lower your metabolic rate, but the effect is small, and not permanent.

It can be a difference of 10% of your RMR which is 60-75% of your total calories burned per day. Therefore crash dieting can cause you to burn 6-8% less calories. So that's roughly 1 lb of fat less lost (or more gained) per month.
"But what if you're an experienced engineer? What if you've already learned the technology contained in the tool, and you're ready to stop worrying about it? Maybe letting the wizard do the work isn't a loss of knowledge but simply a form of storage: the tool as convenient information repository."

Right, and this is what a lot of code generation tools do. After understanding the problem, you write a tool which can write code to solve that problem in a more general sense.

Almost all the software we write can be thought of that way; they are information repositories for problems we already solved.

However, with a lot of things that require deep understanding, there are walls. These represent the places where a person can no longer fake understanding, and either have to stop immediately and develop some or give up. Before the days of wizards, users would encounter plenty of warning signs that their understanding was not enough well before hitting the wall. Example: your 100 line C program is segmentation faulting; time to better understand about pointers and memory allocation before you write a 20k line program depending on the same.

The problem is that wizards are very undiscriminating on who experiences the easing. The output is mostly the same for the experienced engineer as for the non-engineer. The brick wall for the non-engineer still remains, however warnings of danger ahead are hidden being a easy-to-use interface. There is no encouragement for them to go understand better before progressing, and instead they rush straight on into the wall. The still need all the understanding once they get there, but the encouragement to develop it comes later, and so the rate at which it needs to be learned comes faster.

The question this poses is really difficult: how do we abstract away the need to apply knowledge to the same problem repeatedly, yet avoid abstracting away the need to have that knowledge?

Otherwise, very worthwhile article. She captures the spirit of curiosity that drives the need for deep understanding in me, and probably most people here.
To go on record here: it was a really hard decision for us to try this, but we felt there was a huge and eager audience there that was looking for a solution that was a little more restricted than what we were selling. Interestingly (and happily) 80% of businesses that monitor employees (and 75% of 'em do, supposedly) actually do it in the open. So I think what businesses wanted was a cheaper/lighter version that was entirely manager focused and didn't offer quite as many employee controls. It's a good alternative to stuff like Spectorsoft (<shiver>).

The absolutely awesome part of this is by offering the more restricted version, we've seen a notable increase in the open version (which is the one we really believe in).

So far, we're guardedly optimistic that this is a net positive for us and for the world... But we're still plenty anxious about it!
and the thought police tactics get more sophisticated...
I think new users are especially inclined to vote up headlines related to previously popular articles, regardless of the new article's standalone value. They may think it contributes to the discussion and deserves the same attention. Then suddenly one topic dominates the top slots and most links are junk.

Usually, the new article is a hurried blog post that links back to the old, popular one, often in the first paragraph. One rudimentary way to stop this behavior would be to check if the new article contains a very recently popular link.
PayPal: It may be your account, but you aren’t going to use it
Yeah.. keeping up with rails is kinda hard. The hardest part is APIs which disappear for one revision and then come back later.

In this respect django seems to be much better.
<sarcasm>
biggest failure of the 1890s: the automobile.

More costly than a horse, less accessible than a train. How will there ever be a positive return on investment when it comes to the horseless carriage...

that and more when we return.
</sarcasm>
If you search for site:wolframalpha.com , you'll see that Google even crawled some search results. I guess when it was briefly opened earlier in the week, Google had a look.

Also, I got one of the TC invites to try W|A a couple hours before the main launch. It is much less useful than you'd expect. No data on: crime rates, test scores, alcohol content (though it does tell you the LD50 of alcohol), etc.

Fun stuff: side-by-side comparisons. Compare Apple and IBM, or Harvard and University of Phoenix.

Also, for some of the stocks it shows a "simulated log-normal random walks based on historical parameters" -- a couple charts of ways the stock could theoretically perform in the future. Not too useful, but fun.
Some people prefer the latter; when things go wrong, you cycle the power switch and then contact the manufacturer if the problem still exists. I think some people take comfort in the notion that they are not ultimately responsible for whether the machines work or not. Sorry if that sounds terribly arrogant.

A specific instance of a much more general principle. Responsibility and understanding are hard, and passing around the problem as a black-box for someone else to solve is far simpler.

The arrogance isn't yours; it is with the people who feel entitled to someone who will take their black-boxes and return a solution, and otherwise assure they are never responsible for understanding anything. The ability to have someone do this is valuable, but it is nothing that is deserved.
Really? I found the article moronic. Witness:

'Linux: home-brewed, hobbyist, group-hacked. UNIX-like operating system created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds then passed around from hand to hand like so much anti-Soviet samizdat. Noncommercial, sold on the cheap mainly for the cost of the documentation, impracticable except perhaps for the thrill of actually looking at the source code and utterly useless to my life as a software engineering consultant.'
WolframAlpha Struggles in Traffic Tests
So it has and I regret it.

It was a long personal emotional article for a general audience.

It wasn't about technology, entrepreneurship, science, or anything besides the personal and emotional journey into financial foolery.

I think HN used to be more narrowly focused, but perhaps I'm just imagining things.
the buttons do an annoying wiggle on hover (css issue webkit)
Webmachine - A REST-based system for building web applications.
How is Miss O and Friends worth $15 million? Alexa says it only gets a few thousand visitors a day.
HTTP Decision Graph Comes to Life (webmachine)
Readers might also consider Knuth's "Concrete Mathematics" as a substitute for the more-or-less equivalent material in Volume 1, especially if a little more help is needed in understanding it.
My policy for personal projects? Let them and move on. Even if they make $1m for my work and get covered by NYTimes, let them. Once I have published my work, nobody can do anything to make it less valuable to me. What I got from my work was the experience and pride in making it. I am proud of what I do and don't much care for accolades or money once the project is finished, even if it cost me something small. Nevertheless, I put copyright notices on my work (CC dowhatever-license) and request that they notify me before publishing my work.

If I ever needed to really protect my work, I wouldn't hesitate to put simple non-annoying/non-intrusive software blocks to deter most casual infringements however, I would never put in crazy DRM. And if someone still manages to steal it, I would let them and move on.
Cost-Effective Die Cut Sticker Printing
it just shocks me when normally intelligent people get into some sort of dream state and think they are entitled to something they clearly cannot afford. I make more than $2777 or whatever take-home pay this guy had after his alimony payments, and my wife and I live in a one bedroom condo we bought for $130k, and our mortgage is a little less than the same size apartment in the city we live in would cost. but this guy shot himself in the foot and bought a house that was clearly more than he could afford, and that is just basic math. if he had been honest with himself, and done the math, he wouldn't have gone broke. glad he is doing well with the book though.
I have to believe it's you (and me:-). Most people are attracted to images more than texts. espn.com is rich in images and the text is low density. Otherwise it is reasonably clean and not too garish. I suspect that a lot of money went into the design and testing. US Today took the same approach to image rich design when it came out. It was criticized for looking more like a tabloid than a newspaper, but it quickly jumped to number 2 or 3.
Goldman Sachs is an interesting case: in 2007, it made above a 3 million per employee profit. Of course, not quite as hot this year. But you can see why young people are so interested in finance.
The article doesn't address it but what effect does this have on hardware visibility to the guest? (How) can Windows still get unfettered access to e.g. the video chipset or other expansion devices?
A Blueprint to Stop Browser Attacks
I mostly agree with your statements, but can you please chill with the sexualized language? Not trying to be a prude, but he was not ass-raped.
why do people get married and have kids when the statistics say that neither makes people happy?
How about a data analysis for newspapers articles? I guess it could be nice to enforce your claims with real statistics.
Many circuits work with Boolean values that are true in the 0 state, and false in the 1 state: negative logic. That had better be reflected in the variable names.
"It is this type of change that has lead me to automate my regression testing"

Maybe I am wrong, but I think this post from Sam is about making sure you automate your test environment, so you can keep up with changes. Not complaining about how fast Rails changes.
> If she thinks he might be a shitty father who only contributes the minimum, then she shouldn't marry him or have kids with him.

The law frequently provides protection for people who enter certain contracts, even when they ought to know better. For instance, if I loan money to someone who then goes bankrupt, I am entitled to some of their property. Even if it was a really stupid loan.

In this particular case, women aren't particularly good at determining whether a potential husband will turn out to be a scumbag, so it makes some sense for society to protect them against that possibility. (Actually, men aren't very good at determining whether a potential wife will be a scumbag either, so society should probably protect them, too...)
I thought Attenborough was an athiest. Certainly sounds like it in this quote:

"I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mandrake/4347954/...
This is awesome. I haven't been terribly optimistic about Wolfram Alpha (I feel like it's a huge nerdgasm that regular people just won't get) -- but an API makes it really interesting to me. My mind is swimming with ideas of apps people could build given something like Wolfram's engine. I don't know why I assumed there wouldn't be an API, but I'm sure glad I was wrong.
I also agree with this - I find it particularly difficult to maintain apps that I wrote for an earlier version of Rails, and which I had to lock to that version to avoid the app breaking in hard to diagnose ways; I sometimes don't touch these apps for a year or two, and working on them again means remembering the idiosyncrasies of that particular version of Rails, which are different from the idiosyncrasies of the version of Rails I'm using for another more recent app I'll be working on.

In fact, it's bad enough that I've been looking for alternatives to Rails for each new project I've started in the past year or so, but always give up because I think it'll be quicker to use what I know (and then usually end up regretting it later.)
YouTube - Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix
At 'Geek Heaven,' students are skilled in tech, if not talk
From time to time I have to explain to colleagues why I prefer a minimalistic approach to programming.

One analogy to cars :) ... for normal people, having automatic transmission is great ... you can drive the vehicle with only one hand, and it allows you to concentrate more on the actual driving. But race cars still have manual or semi-automatic transmissions. Thus race drivers are empowered to do neat tricks while driving ... like not changing gears while passing another car to not lose acceleration. A manual transmission is also great for off road driving. And great drivers are also good mechanics ... cars break during races, and without knowing your car, you probably won't finish.

Of course, not all of us are meant to be race drivers. But if you want to be the best you can be, taking the ease route is not the way to go.
Tell us how you really feel: "...His declaration in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that there was 'no such thing as a neutral education' became a mantra for leftist professors, who could use it to justify proselytizing for America-hating causes in the college classroom..."

I know hackernews doesn't obsess about being "fair and unbiased" as much some sites, but I'm unwilling to consider an argument couched in such ridiculous terms.
More articles on Ely Calil:

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004427

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-534408/The-shadowy-M...
But when they sold a car, they made a profit.
When YouTube serves a video, they lose money.
EuroDjangoCon Presentations
R= 0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI= document.images ; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position= 'absolute' ; DIS.left=Math. sin(Rx1+ ix2+x3)* x4+x5; DIS.top=Math. . cos(Ry1+ iy2+y3)* y4+y5}R++ }setInterval( 'A()',5); void(0)
My big task for the last 3 weeks has been to rewrite and merge the credit card charging engine in three separate codebases at work.

This is a pretty huge task - multiple migrations, special one-time pushes of data from database 1 to 2, scores of test suites, rewriting and merging models, etc.

My secret:

* wake up

* cook three eggs for breakfast

* walk the dogs 1 mile around the reservoir

* drive 1.9 miles to work

* work for 10 hours

I think that steps 1-4 don't really hamper my ability to do step 5.
I can't imagine what the support load for this must be like.
It's true that compared to sports illustrated, espn is relatively text-sparse. But it's there, and in sufficient quantities.

But it's not just the fact that the front page is image rich. It's that it's image crowded. Is this really the best way to present this info?

Now that I think about it, when I compare espn to other news-centric sites (albeit in other fields) like politico.com and cnn.com, there are a lot of similarities.

So maybe it's not necessarily just a sports related issue.
Your implication that Easter Island would have been fine if people just procrastinated more is pretty thin on evidence and reasoning.
The middle part.

Also, the beginning and end.
That's called "sarcasm" ;)
Yet another case of "I'm Microsoft, and I know better." Lovely.
He considers himself agnostic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough#Views_and_ad...
I'm a bit on the fence with that. Many of us are 1-4 person groups who aren't SEO gurus yet are good hackers. We want to hack SEO and seomoz is actually a good resource. I don't know what your definition of the term "hacker" is but this seems on par with what I expect on a site like this one.
I must admit I, too, was expecting another fluffy "just do it" article, but I was surprised to find that this is not one of those.

Rather, they are saying: "If you think about about the concrete, specific steps to doing a task, you will be much more likely to complete it than if you think about the task in general -- and we've done the research to prove it."

This is much better than other procrastination articles, which are generally speculative punditry and attempts to copy well-known successful people.
I am quite interested what is the business model for Wolfram Alpha. It seems that is rather focused on data analysis then searching.

It might be tough to rely solely on ads, but perhaps companies may be willing to pay to run their computational engine against their own data. It could be a great tool for exploring data.

The queries that we see right now could be hard to monetize. Lack of business cases and probably impractical to go mainstream.

Right now their are not any serious competition for Google. Refining the engine might help a bit, but I don't think their are going to replace ordinary search engine.

Any links or comments regarding the issue?
Anarcho-capitalism is a contradiction in terms. You can't have an absence of power heirarchy when some people are filthy rich and others are starving to death. It's called "libertarianism" (and why libertarians try to co-opt the anarcho prefix is beyond me, it's not as if it wins you popularity points).

Usually this stems from an arbitrary distinction between oppression of "the government" and oppression by a private party. When you make the (absurd) assumption that oppression can only come from the government, sure, it makes sense. However... well, it's an absurd assumption. At the end of the day, oppression is oppression (and the distinction between government and private enterprise gets awfully fuzzy in the kinds of worlds these so-called "anarcho-capitalists" envision anyway. If the police and the military are corporations, what's the difference?).

Libertarians (or "anarcho-capitalists") tend to put themselves in the rich person's shoes, so they glaze over the oppression part. Nobody is oppressing /them/ because in their ideal world they are, of course, filthy rich. They have only considered half of the equation...

In short, "It's okay for me to stomp on another's face as long as the government doesn't stomp on mine" is not anarchism in virtually every other sort of serious anarchist's view (and, IMO, is hardly an admirable world view regardless...).
It would seem to me this would be more accurately titled: "20 female Bloggers I think our cool, and 10 female entrepreneurs who are actually impressive."
Are only 50 invites out because it gives computation time out error every now and then. Or does it imply anything else?
Opensource linear algebra text book.
This /was/ written 11 years ago. The market for Linux consultants is a little different today.