skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing is that people tend to cite the best-case effectiveness for condoms and the worst-case for withdrawal, while they are both effective (at preventing pregnancy) if you're not an idiot. The problem is that many people are idiots and can't put a condom on correctly or stop in the heat of things.
Not exactly IT, but K&R's "The C Programming Language" is beautifully concise and contains the perfect blend of examples, explanations and reference. One of my favorite technical books and was at one point, most used, as shown by its highly-worn cover.
I know many people here had the same problem. I just wanted to know what they did and what happened next.

(OK, I whined a little bit as well :)
Woops, I meant:

Are there any publishers of highly compressed books for web development?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_birth_control_met...

Point is, nothing beats intrauterine devices, and pill is the next best thing. The rest are pretty much the same: ok if you pay a lot of attention, risky if not.

The final decision should include a lot of other factors, like willingness to have an abortion or risk of STD, but still, it's a shame intrauterine devices are so underused.
If the template didn't work for you - perhaps you do just need to look around a bit - there are tons of good solid templates out there. here is 100 for starters: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/01/100-free-high-qua...

Learn illustrator for the web or fireworks before photoshop if you want to do it yourself and nice curves work wonders.

I'm doing a slinkset site up at the moment (in my profile) which I haven't promoted yet as it need some finishing touches but it's going to be somewhere you can post for jobs like this, look for advice or find templates etc.
The US, UK, Canada etc, yes - countries with long traditions of immigrants both assimilating and contributing to their culture. It's an order of magnitude more difficult in a country without that tradition. Most places in the world, immigrants with no ties to the country are an economic and social underclass, with just the occasional success. Try being Moroccan in France or Turkish in Germany. There're very few places where there's even close to a level playing field.
I'll quote my comment:

OO principles also allow programmers to selectively expose complexity, hopefully reducing complexity to a commonsense model of what is going on. (Essential complexity?) However, this amounts to volunteering to do “the right thing,” as even “pure OO” environments like Smalltalk allow one to violate encapsulation and write procedural code. I can see how a “pure functional” environment would make it difficult to write procedural code. But one can also create spaghetti OO models that respect encapsulation. I imagine that one can create spaghetti pure functional code as well.
It would be good to submit the "study" mentioned in the submitted article

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/reprints/Contracepti...

to a review of the checklist on interpreting research results.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
I don't understand why Gladwell seems to be the only person that gets a free pass to make totally illogical arguments, but have hundreds of smart people say "oh, well sure, the argument sucks, but you're missing the point".
The fear of being held responsible could also be a certain factor of the keenness of the advisor; concern for what 'evidence' exactly ends up in that notebook.
I had this very problem and what I did was use the Emergent Task Timer. Now, I know this sounds like lifehacker fluff, but it really worked for me. I used this:

http://davidseah.com/tools/ett/alpha/

Save it to your desktop and what you do is this, write 4-5 tasks you want to complete, and make sure you can hear the beep every 15 mins.

What I do is work on something, if I hear the beep and I'm still working, I keep going. If I hear the beep and I'm not working on said task, I go in to ETT and write what I did over the past 15-30-45-60 minutes. Make sure to put an entry for "IM", "Email", "Telephone","Bathroom" and "Food".

What happened is that when I started using it, I realized I only did about 2-3 hours of productive work a day. It took me a few months to push that up to about 7-8 in an 8-10 hour work day, but you get there by keeping track of how much actual work you do in a day.

Slimtimer.com also works well to this effect. Basically, just take the time to count where every minute goes. You'll soon identify where your focus is going instead of your project and be able to fix it.

Closing IM was key for me. :)
Samsung B2100 Xplorer: New Rugged Mobile To Be Launched in India
The best CTOs of 2009
Coding Horror: The Girl Who Proved P = NP
46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards
Cloud outages don’t bother Stanley
The advice above is great if you have a real passion and talent for design or if you really need to save the $$$. However, as a counterpoint I'll share some compelling reasons to hire/borrow a real designer, even if that means paying some $$$ for a short-term contract:
(1) It takes time to learn design skills. Can you really afford the opportunity cost? Wouldn't that time be better spent on business/hacker work?
(2) For a credible product, you need a professional finish. Sure, you can go for a simple look like Google but even doing that well takes serious skills. Design is like DIY in your home - it's easy to 'get by' but hard to do a real professional job.
(3) You will probably take longer to do this work than a professional. This means that not only are you spending valuable business/hacker time but you're spending even more time than a professional would.
Fast though. At least they understand that much about why Google won.

MS is using Akamai as the CDN to deliver search results, hence it is fast.
Jabra BT8030- The Hybrid
Jabra delved into the hybrid Bluetooth market launched the Jabra BT8030 the world's first combined Bluetooth speaker and headphones. Never before has Bluetooth technology been combined in such a dynamic and innovative manner offers complete flexibility.In first glimpse, the Jabra BT8030 looks like a huge pair of headphones which fits very snugly over the head that felt pretty comfortable due to the amount of padding and with its adjustable length of the headband for the size of your head you can wear it for longer periods of time. The Jabra BT8030 has good digital signal processing for optimal sound which is better suited for quieter environments and we had no trouble hearing our callers and vice versa. It has a rated battery life of 26 hours in music mode, 32 hours in talk mode, and standby time of 25 days.So get this pretty deal of Jabra BT8030 at Unlockcell.com.
Generating JavaScript isn't hard, so if you're using a lot of forms that require validation, it should be pretty straightforward to generate JavaScript and back-end validators from the same description. Still, you have to use some ruleset and hope it covers all your cases, etc.

If you only have 1 or 2 forms, it's probably just easier to do it manually...
Ask HN: Search for Hacker News on Bing
I've tried taking this attitude in the past, but it only works if you have a well developed social circle with friends and colleagues who have a good estimate of what you think is important. Otherwise, you suffer from two disadvantages from the philosophy...

1) Information that gets to you will be filtered by an "importance guesstimate." Some information will not reach you, because your social circle will regard the info as useless, irrelevant, or "impolite." This last one is dangerous, because such information is the kind this disproves the axiom "What you don't know can't hurt you."

2) People in your social circle may have a higher view of their own judgment that they do of yours, even if they correctly know what's important to you. Therefore, you will sometimes get information you DON'T want and waste your time because your friends and associates will have their own agendas to push in providing extra info to you.
Ah, I did partially misunderstand. I agree that the potential exists for universities to eventually be partially replaced by some other system, and I also think that right now we as a society undervalue vocational training.

With that said, I do not know what that partial replacement will be and I do not think (though I certainly could be wrong) that it will come anytime in the near future.
Moore's Law isn't going to die. It's going to be extended, (or supplanted) by further developments, like Einstein's gravitation extended Newton's.

There are many, many successor technologies to CMOS out there: nanotubes, nanowires, magnetic switching, molecular switching, photonic switching. I'm sure more have been proposed in the five years since I stopped paying attention.

The situation for semiconductor researchers and manufacturers is a lot like the one Edison faced with the light bulb. We know what we want, and there's a huge field of options open in front of us. Now we just have to spend some time on basic research to figure out what scales and what doesn't. This might take some time, but a delay will only make the next doubling more lucrative when it becomes feasible.

And if you're comfortable with (only slightly) more far-out ideas, the wall is being written right now:

http://metamodern.com/2009/05/22/a-third-revolution-in-dna-n...

It so happens that this development has been anticipated here:

http://e-drexler.com/d/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html
Some of these factors are network effects. I conjecture that every product has some kind of network effect; it's a question of degree. A telephone 100% network effect; a USB drive might seem to have no network effects, but most people are biased towards the most popular one.

I think your criteria of "explosively successful" might require very strong network effects - it certainly requires some way to reach lots of people, and network effects are one way of doing so (the de.li.ci.ous guy mentioned 3 needed factors, and this was one - he also put a new-to-me twist on it. I'll try to find the post). If you relax it to modest, steady growth, it might not require strong network effects (and possibly might be more stable - because resistant to explosively growing competitors...).
Here's the interesting bit. Under the first link, which is for Hacker News, there are other links for: "Hacker News", "Feature Requests", "New" and then HN user names, among other names, my name shows up.

Do HN users see other usernames? Does this change depending on geography? Can you list the other links you see? Thanks!
Minimalism can get you pretty far. Good examples: Cutline by Chris Pearson, Daring Fireball blog, Google.
One word: ADDERRALL
Warnings for 1st time Entrepreneurs
Qualcomm shows Eee PC running Android
I didn't realize that the best course of action in life is to follow the dreams you had as a 9 year old. While the idea might sound romantic, by age 10, these kids realized that they didn't actually want to be president.

I think its a little more apt to figure out what you want to do with your life when you're 18, 21, 30, 40, 50, etc.
Airbus A330: Missing Air France jet over Atlantic | Headlines
Good to know that there are hackers who get up at 5:30AM.

Would love to see when you will get up after you leave your day-job. :)
Which part of the UI design didn't you like? The background image?
To be more specific (since I have been downvoted), Kipling was an early adopter of the motor car. At the time he wasn't impressed enough to include them in his list of "great things" quoted by the article.

Of course that may be poetic license, since he's putting the words into the mouth of someone who would not necessarily have seen a car. Alternatively it may be a matter of Kipling's perception of the potential for the vehicle.

Still, I thought it was interesting that the words of someone who was in fact remarkably gung-ho about the motor car were being used in this fashion.
You missed a meta-level. The design doesn't interfere with having a fast implementation. It interferes with implementing a fast implementation.

"It's a slow language," implies that there's something special about Ruby that precludes (relatively) fast implementation. There's nothing special about Ruby like this. Ruby is a very nice remix of language features that existed before. Getting a language to be fast can require many iterations. Ruby's syntax is a high barrier to entry to implementers, so fewer eyeballs have been looking at the problem.

Contrast this with Smalltalk.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619398

Smalltalk was designed to be quickly implemented by a single programmer. Implementing a "Bluebook VM" was treated as a rite of passage for support engineers for at least one of the vendors. As a result, people have implemented many, many variations on Smalltalk. (Including an VM with built-in OODB, another that can compile down to a C++ compatible DLL indistinguishable from one written in C++, another that ran on the old Palms, one with optional typing, and many others.)

I think it's fair to say that writing a Ruby VM is probably an order of magnitude harder.
Marketers have been dealing with increasingly-"deaf" audience for ages now. This is just a high profile example of it, but it's not new nor revolutionary: it's part of the trend.
GM Files For Chapter 11
I personally like the way they integrated the "advanced" search box in the results page. It actually makes it easy to do an advanced search. Neither Yahoo nor Google has this.

Combined with the impressive speed, I think it stands a chance.
Dead Simple Rails Deployment
Yes, there is at least one tool that does this. There is a Ruby on Rails plugin called Client-Side Validation. It generates client-side Javascript validation based on the existing validation in the model, which the server already checks against. You can find it here: http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/client_side_validatio.... I haven't tried it myself, so I can't vouch for how well it works. There also may be other, newer libraries for doing this out there.

I certainly agree that elimination of this repetition would be very helpful when developing websites. If the code can be generated automatically for you, there are very few situations where you wouldn't want client-side as well as server-side validation. (Some of those few situations might include expecting the user to have a computer too slow for Javascript or being unable to expose the validation method to the user for security reasons.)
"To Wilmott, Gaussian is an example of how dangerously abstract quant finance has become. 'We need to get back to testing models rather than revering them,' he says. 'That's hard work, but this idea that there are these great principles governing finance and that correlations can just be plucked out of the air is totally false.'"

Hear. Hear.
I'm getting a lot of 500 errors thrown here, but the project looks fairly interesting.
I want to help you write better...
Go make a grid with hours between 7am and 1am for Sunday - Saturday

You don't even need to be that labor-intensive - the Emergent Task Timer works great.

http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-iii-emergent-tas... [links to PDFs are at the bottom]
have you heard of amdahl's law (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law) before? The push towards parallelism and multicore is a ploy for processor sales. Most applications can't benefit from a parallelism on more than 4-8 cores. There are applications such as computer graphics and servers that benefit, but your average user only uses one core right now. The problem that processors are facing is that clock speed can't be increased. The heat can't be dissipated fast enough and they would melt if run faster.
Well, basic physics -- it already takes nontrivial time for signals to cross the die. If you make the die bigger, you're probably just going to be using that to add more cores, and the time for the furthest-apart cores to communicate is going to grow.
One problem I see with hiring a designer is that it becomes hard to change the site after the deed is done. It is difficult to make incremental improvements.
Go full time on your idea. Or at least make some commitment so that there is a monthly burn(say a hosted server or a github account at the minimum). Nothing like pressure to keep one focused. This is from my own experience.
And I ended up following!!!
The email address validation is overly restrictive. Valid email addresses can contain + and other characters.
So if I wanna use an email adress like myname+keyword@gmail.com it gets flagged as invalid by the script.
(I use it to do filtering based on the +keyword in gmail)
I wrote a book. It was un-DRM'd and made available for download on various Bittorrent trackers. I still made plenty of money.

Next time, I refuse to inflict DRM on my users. It only hurts the people that actually pay. The people that pirate it aren't inconvenienced by DRM at all. That is pretty fucked up, IMHO.
Doculicious: Printable Forms For Your Website
Well I personally like to bartend when I'm not hacking. I find it really helps me reload. It's great, I get to be super social and make money. Its not even really like work.

And its great when your talking to girls cause you can make yourself sound like a super hero, "Yah, I'm a hacker by day, bartender by night!" Chicks dig super heroes.
"It seems to me he's justified in not wanting to waste his time writing patches that wouldn't be accepted anyways."

He is free to provide packages that replace core python libraries. The fact he doesn't want to do so and would only give his contributions if they are included in the standard Python libraries is childish, at best.
I get

* Hacker News
* New
* Freaky
* Paraschopra

* Johng
* Feature Requests
* Ph0rque
* Prakash

as sublinks.
Sims Video Game
Enjoy all the fun and creativity of The Sims™ 2 in The Sims™ 2 Double Deluxe. Create your own houses, neighborhoods, Sims, and family dynasties—then watch it all come to life! Will your Sims experience the rewards of a life well lived? Or will you choose to neglect their needs, indulge their fears, and see what happens? As your Sims’ family grows, you’ll see them pass on genes from one generation to the next. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe also contains The Sims™ 2 Nightlife Expansion Pack, The Sims™ 2 Celebration Stuff Pack and a bonus DVD. Take your Sims downtown in their new cars to all the after-dark hot spots! Whether they’re dancing ‘til dawn on a guys’ night out, romancing that special someone by candlelight, or throwing strikes at the bowling alley, it will be a night to remember. Then host the social event of the season with The Sims™ 2 Celebration Stuff Pack. Host an elegant wedding, decorate their house and garden to throw the ultimate fiesta, or throw the biggest birthday bash with all-new items including birthday cakes, party balloons, and more!
What's the news? Deployon passenger using git's its not new.
I wonder why mlton doesn't have a higher profile. Is it hard to use, or something?
It’s stunning how much people can overpay on just about anything.

However, even if every cent of that was "needed" we are still only talking about ((3 *225 + 200) /2 ) ~= 440k in HW which is ~1/3 of the stated number and probably a small percentage of the budget over those 3 years + dev time.

PS: I know they would have saved a lot of money by using 8 CPU machines, but that's part of my point. Scaling the DB system has little to do with the app code and it shows just another way the project was miss managed.
What does it do besides give 500 errors?
What set of fatal flaws are you talking about?
Javascript Audio Interface - A Flashless HTML5  Player
Nice app :) Thanks!
Who'se been a busy body then?
After getting over my disappointment that you can't help me write better (I need to write more to achieve that) and realising that this is a WordPress-centric spell+style+grammar checker, I had a quick look around and liked what I saw. Looking good, well done and good luck.
Funny. Where I work, if I show/explain/tell someone how to do something, I can either repeat the lesson every time the question comes up, or document the procedure in detail and give the person a copy. If I do take the time to document it, then I can simply reprint a copy every time the question comes up.

Now if only I had a way to handle the situation where someone attempts to perform a task, but forgets an important step or two along the way.
The article doesn't say that this is new. It simply specifies how easy it is to deploy Rails apps on Passenger.
I may share your position on Zed, but people here generally dislike comments that don't add to the discussion, or are blatant attacks on someone; your post fits both perhaps?
To each their own.

Personally, I found it fascinating. As a programmer, I've got a lot of respect for the obsessive attention to detail, as well as the time consumed. :)

Constructing software is a lot like building that model. You break the problem down into a million tiny little pieces, and then you meticulously craft and polish each piece as you fit them together. Sometimes you labor for hours (or days) on pieces that people will never see, like the blue on those exhaust pipes.

At the end of the project, you've got something that you can appreciate and show off. Maybe it's useful, maybe it's just beautiful, but either way it's yours because you built it.

Props to the model builder, and thanks to the guy that put this on HN. It injected a little bit of awesome into my day.
Is there an alternative (on OSX) for this application (designing website/app layouts) to Photoshop? I've used Gimp in the past but they seem like completely different animals and the tutorials for Photoshop were all but useless.

I have a hard time swallowing the price of Photoshop for such a limited application, when I'd probably be using less than 25% of what it does...
Chart.ly Off Course
Handmade Jewelry @ Cure Jewelry
Unique online jewelry store that offers handmade jewelry that also raises money to help fight breast cancer by donating 10% of sales to Susan G. Komen For The Cure.
I am suspicious as well, or perhaps stronger--I am likely to say "humbug" to such claims. Having made many of them loudly at various points in my career, starting with Structured Programming, OOP. There was also the Rational phase, as in the Rational Unified Method, in which the methodology was though to hold the true silver bullet.

Doing functional programming still leaves you with the essential complexity.

But I wonder if "procedural programming is the foundation upon which all other edifices are constructed" is necessarily true. Could we not build a computer that was truly functional throughout?
Doesn't work in Konqueror 3.5.10.

Google does :)
It was part of the Django Dash so the guys only had 2 days to build it, hence the scaling issues :D. AFAIK they are continuing work on it (add support for SVN/HG etc.) so stability should improve pretty fast.
I get exactly the same.

As an addendum I also like how it triggers on the news keyword and includes a snippet of the latest news results above the main search results. Very handy.
GM Files For Bankruptcy Protection
These kids are essentially the victims of a crime. When they get to college and/or the workforce they will have two skills: being quiet and taking tests.
Article is blocked here at the office, but since playing with the Passenger/Capistrano/SVN workflow I don't think it gets much more simple than:

svn commit -m "Added stuff."

cap:deploy
Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking.
Wufoo already does this
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor
Reducing waste is like performance optimization - you should only do it once your code is correct. The original poster just paid $1000 for a meal probably consisting of fish that was pulled from the ocean on the other side of the planet 12 hours ago. The resource cost of acquiring this food, preparing it, and operating the restaurant will dwarf the cost of a nice receipt. If you prefer, they could hand write it on nice post consumer recycled stationary to save some "trees".
A downward spiral of progress: Why companies keep ruining your favorite products