skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Behold http://irctc.co.in/ - the ticket booking website of the largest train network in the world -- Indian railways.

A mishmash of images for text, deeply nested tables, mandatory login even to query available trains... The earlier avatar was even more horrible, and that's the only good thing I have to say about IRCTC website.

Even with all this, I'm thankful to have online booking for the trains. The other alternative was to spend 2 hours in reservation counter or pay 40-50 bucks to the local travel agent to do the booking for you.
A proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable in verse.
If not in the Valley, at least compete with it
It's also the /proc filesystem
The Risk of Debt
I understand agnostic... but I find his stuff to be very skewed against religion and spirituality, Dawkins is a well known, self professed atheist. I find spending so much time and effort on these particular topics just so strange... I don't see a contradiction between faith in the existence of a greater intelligence and rationality and faith only makes sense when there is no evidence. It's an emotional thing not an intellectual thing. We can all believe whatever we want and when we die, we'll find out what the real deal is.
I can believe they got a lot of hits and site crashed.

I just really don't believe they got 300,000 hits in any single second. Also how would they have even known? since the site would have crashed a long time before that number if they weren't prepared for it.
I recently had to endure a weekend without internet, and I felt the same way. I ended up mostly watching TV, and in the end felt like I had accomplished nothing.

It's painful to think about, but I have no idea how I would have survived if I had lived outside the age of digital technology.
Great list, and yes, never try to build an all purpouse library the first time you are solving a problem.
Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering
If you think standard medical care is bad, wait until you see the state of dentistry int he US.

A two-barrel caulk gun costs $3 at a home-improvement warehouse, but $250 if ordered through a medical supply catalog (with the same part number stamped on it). A dental handpiece costs $2500 to buy and $80 to repair in the US, but one can be bought new for $70 from China. And the Chinese ones work just as well, if not better.

For some reason, American dentists are remarkably risk-adverse; while they'll moan and complain about how high their bills are, they'll also refuse to consider any solution unless they've personally used it for 30 years. Just getting them to use computerized practice management is Sisyphean struggle.
Why people fall victim to scams – OFT research
I'd recommend buying this book: http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-Tr.... It shows you the trigger points which cause referred pain. I reference this book quite frequently and would also recommend (no joke) taking a woman's nylon and putting a tennis ball in it. You can then hold the open end of the nylon and hang the tennis ball over your shoulder with your back towards a wall. By applying pressure (by leaning) on the tennis ball for a few seconds, you can alleviate trigger points or sore muscles.
Which gui? TortoiseGit looks like it is making progress: http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/

The Porcelain command line interface is quite nice itself. Gitk isn't pretty (not Apple-style pretty at least) but perfectly functional for viewing logs.
If you want to deter crime, use brain scans to identify potential criminals and give them medication to change the way their brain works.
correct. but they each take a global interpreter lock ensuring only one is executing at any given time.
GitX is pretty awesome for Mac. http://gitx.frim.nl/
I'm curious why someone would go through the trouble to stay on 1.8?
Report: Mint Considers Selling Anonymized Data from Its Users
Are You Okay to Kiss?
No we don't, 1,000,000 is how we group. India, however, does group by two digits, with the exception of the first hundred: 10,00,000
Terminus is by far my favorite. I am disappointed it was not mentioned.

http://fractal.csie.org/~eric/wiki/Terminus_font

apt-get install xfonts-terminus
Dedicated terminus user too!
Yeah, I was thinking this sounded like a Hail Mary pass, but I like your analogy more.
Do they replant the trees each year or do they cut off branches for the hardwood?
Facebook Apps Will Make More Money Than Facebook In 2009
Like his stance or not, I have come to greatly appreciate people who don't sugar coat things...
Not making that decision might in fact prove to be the luxury.
yeah right... amateurs sharing stock tips in < 140 characters. A hedge fund goldmine for sure...
Imagine the following:

You're out at a bar with a couple of friends. A few minutes after you've gotten there, another friend of yours comes in. He comes over, you say him, exchange a few quick words, and he nods to your friends and heads back to his group.

Now, by acknowledging him, you're not giving your other friends your full attention. It might have been a little insensitive of you not to introduce him, but he was clearly in a rush. I don't consider this particularly rude, and I fail to see how texting is much different. There is context - at a nice restaurant, you probably would want to introduce him to the rest of your friends. In most contexts, though, a quick acknowledgment of other people is entirely acceptable, and texting isn't much different.

If you're materially distracted by texting or phone conversation, that's different. But I see no reason to say that I have to ignore everybody else I know when I'm with you.
Optimizing MySQL Performance with ZFS
don't forget the fail whale
Why don't we focus on building applications that add value whether your friends are using it or not. Hence no need to be viral. It can be useful if only 1 person uses it or if 2M people use it.
How do the trustees of this forest sell carbon sequestration? Do they just say "this forest sequesters a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, and for $10/ton, we will associate those good works with your company's name"?
FbFund Finalist List Shows the Future of Facebook is Facebook Connect
I think you didn't get it, hedge funds will be stealing money from these amatures, by knowing what's on their minds. Crowds, if you can predict them (or direct them), you can be rich.
I think it's a great design and really well-laid out site. I understood immediately what it is you're doing. However, I don't have the problem that you're solving so I'm not that interested. I'm not a student though, so maybe that's more your target audience. For me, delicious is enough to organize info on the web.
We would definitely be interested in anyone looking for internships, any time. Contact me at jbenzenberg at eretailing dot com.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn5-VN3SH1o
A good rule of thumb for me is that texting is acceptable for coordinating the next move in the evening, but texting people completely unrelated to the current company is not.
This is a wonderful way to teach. Inspired.
The timing on this post is funny. I just submitted Nate's blog post from yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=615446

On how a trivial implementation error (one we're familiar with already) in Debian's OpenSSL means that any message signed with Debian OpenSSL DSA reveals private keys. That's a micro-error; Debian and OpenSSL may have got almost everything else right, but fucked up one tiny detail, and now exposing the ciphertext of certain messages leaks your private key.

This isn't crypto-geek chauvinism. If crypto isn't a big part of what you do in your day-to-day, you're just not going to get this stuff right. That may be the point Jeff is actually trying to make (and the reason he isn't offering a neat solution in his article), but look at the comments on how to "do it right", and you can see that isn't the message that's getting transmitted.

There's a much bigger flaw in Atwood's cryptosystem than has been discussed here --- forget CBC --- but I'm not going to post it, because it will just result in 20 comments about how easy that is to fix, and here's 15 crazy heuristics to do it, so nyah!
Copy and paste coding is often its own punishment.
Now imagine a line of friends, each coming by about once every 5 minutes or so.
GPG is a program. It isn't an algorithm. Consider reading it before you propose alternatives, which are likely to be broken.

Like I posted upthread, there's a laundry list of things that program is going to give you besides picking a better algorithm than "Triple DES" and a better block cipher mode. But listing them is just begging for a bunch of people to propose wack-ass alternative solutions that other people will feel obliged to waste time knocking down.
Direct links for convenience:

http://www.webnotes.net

http://www.webnotes.net/Press/CaseStudies.aspx
Library compatibility. Many libraries are still not compatible with 1.9. It's good to have interim improvements for 1.8 until the ecosystem has caught up with 1.9, because 1.8 is what actually powers production systems today.
I did, and read voraciously, at a pace and with a scope that now seems incredible to me.

However, even while reading, there's more than one thread of thought going on in your head, wondering about whether this historical figure in the book really did that thing, or whether you need to have that report in Tuesday morning or Thursday morning, or what this typeface is called and what its history is, and so on. Before the internet, I had to ignore most of these to get anything done, since I would have ended up spending a very large percentage of my time writing them down and researching them, and most of those thoughts just weren't worth it.

Now, though, I can put the book down for a moment and look up most of these instantly, and then go back to the book. Or not, because often the new questions that arise from the answers to these, and their answers, are more interesting than the fiction novel I was reading -- and this is part of my point: that the internet has both vastly increased the number of things I can find out about and my total consumption of information, and has greatly increased my average interest in what I'm doing, since I can stop and do something more interesting (in my own time) at any time. Usually whatever novel or textbook I was reading in the 80s was so boring that I wouldn't bother with it at all now, but at the time it was just the most interesting thing I had, and all the immediate alternatives to "read this book" were even more boring. I didn't have a great childhood, in retrospect, but at the time it seemed that my major problem was boredom.

I guess that's enough self-examination for one post. :)
good old thoughtcrime.
Plug and Play startup incubator eyes $20M for seed fund
The whole 'viral' meme is rather arogant - the result is the annoying barrage of meaningless 'updates' or solicitations to contaminate your friends. I find the 'spreadable' metaphore promoted by Henry Jenkins (http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it...) much more socially productive.
But with a cure.
Twitter's New Search Might Just Change Everything
IMHO, their strategy might have been "if we build what's missing in AMZN's portfolio, we might get acquired". Granted, not the best strategy, but this strategy has worked for some in the past.
This is known as a "party", and lots of people prefer it to other forms of socializing, and those people can now have their party at the same time as the rest of us are having a quiet evening with a couple of friends. I don't text much, but this seems like a win/win to me.

Unrelatedly, I find it very difficult to resist using "link" in the same way I used to use "reply", since "reply" is no longer reliably there (intentionally on a delay, I know). Maybe it's just me.
The tiny exception to tptacek's rule is

* you know specifically why SSL/GPG falls short of your requirements

* you realize that algorithms are only a single part of crypto system design

* you know the exact security ramifications of the details (not just "ecb is bad")

* the encryption capabilities are the critical aspect of your whole system (like freenet)

AND

* you accept that your implementation will be broken (at least) several times

But indeed if you know these things, you know that "use SSL/GPG" is good canonical advice.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.

Every now and then I run across a story like this where someone is overburdened with communication and technology and wants to give it all up for a fixed time to cleanse themselves from the toxicity of modern life. Then they come back renewed, with new energy to conquer it all, and tell everyone how great it is and that everyone should give solitary confinement or meditation a serious attempt. Then a few months later, they get back into their old overloaded lifestyle of stress and constant work.

No, you don't need to give it all up for a month or year to find yourself. This is reaching out to the other extreme because you hope to end up in the center eventually. How about just slowly moving to the center from where you are? Get rid of the email+text features from you cellphone. Billions of people live perfectly fine without it. Keep GPS/web on your phone but only use when needed. Feel free to check your email whenever you have a few minutes but don't reply to it immediately. Shape your routine so you get to do what's important and not just what's urgent.

When not doing something productive or relaxing on the computer, step away. Go kayaking, hiking, camping, or jogging. Go to the movies, mall, museum, theater, art show, or a theme park. Get a backyard project, build something in real life, get your hands dirty. And while you do all of this, make adequate use of the technology available to you without feeling crushed under it. The purpose of technology is to solve real-life problems. It is not to replace real-life with a 24/7 stream of stress. People are good in general. Don't ignore them for a month because they contact you too much using different mediums. Spend more time with them in person, even if they annoy you. And use your knowledge of technology to enrich your and their lives. What good is 15 years of computer knowledge if you renounce it instead of sharing it with others?

Connectivity is not bad. What is bad is not knowing what form of communication to give more value to. Figure out your communication medium hierarchy and live by it. Mine goes:

Face-2-Face > Video chat > Phone > Email > Message boards > Social Networks

My social goal is to take people from the lower end and move them towards higher end. So I may get a friend message me through Facebook, then we'll email, then phone, with the final goal to hang out next time one of us is in town. Without technology, none of this would be possible. I love technology, but only enough to enable me to improve my real-life social activities.
By "development can be planned up front" I mean on a really simple level. I think the example I gave in the presentation was that if you were implementing a user comments feature, you could reference the spec to find the other parts of the site/app that also need user comments and implement a single solution that will cover all cases.

One of the downsides to agile is that you don't always know what's coming further down the road, so you either have to build extremely generic solutions (usually a waste) or very specific solutions that get adapted over time (refactoring is also wasteful).

In situations where budget is tight - which is the position I was coming from - it is optimal to have solutions that are Just Generic Enough to cover needs.

Thanks for your comments :)
When is the best time to launch Pre anyway? 
I've heard people praising and criticizing Palm for releasing Palm Pre a few days before supposedly new iphone may be released. If you're in charge, what would you rather do?
Just because someone can sue you, doesn't mean you've done something illegal.
I do the same - but canoe into Algonquin Park.

You can't bring much when you have to be able to portage all your gear and don't want to make 2 trips. It is really great getting away from it all and enjoying the slow life without SMS and RSS.
Apple Begins Stress Testing Push Notification Servers
The only real alternative to Terminus is LispM font:

http://www.eurogaran.com/downloads/lispmfont/

A similar appearance! The CADR was dreamy in many ways, even its screen font.

Downside: only one size...
They cut down and replant a certain percentage each year. The trees are quite a bit smaller in diameter than the rain forest giants, so the life cycle is much more like normal tree farming practices. In the rain forest, the giants form a canopy that shades the forest floor, so the floor is much more open than you would expect. Mostly there arent any branches except at the crowns, 100-150 feet off the floor. The seedlings cant survive in the gloom until a giant falls. My guess is that a plantation with its smaller trees can grow much more wood than an equivalent area of giants.
Could you be more specific?

I'm fine with the command-line interface, but for sake of argument, I'm curious what you think the UI should be like.
The IAB Sets Some Standards For Social Ads
Well, most people don't get that it's optional, and this is also in part because they don't make it obvious that it is in fact optional.

Clever in some way but I still consider it as tricking people into signing up.
right about now

funk soul brother...
Services cost more in the US, but most stuff costs about the same or a little less. However, you get paid at the inflated services rate.

Go to the correct US store and buy a 100LB bag of cheep rice and it will be cheaper than a lot of developing nations. But go to the dentist, doctor, or a restaurant and it's cheap in the developing world. Granted most things tend to be cheap where they are produced but as long as you avoid having other people do stuff for you living in the US can be extremely cheep.

PS: A friend of mine who was making 46k/year in Fairfax VA, one of the more expensive areas to live in the United States, and saved 20,000$ in one year. He was living the life of an Indian college student in the US and that's cheep. He said the only downside was washing his own clothes, but he just dumped it in the machine so it was a trivial change.
It's a party if everybody is doing it. But if you're the only one doing it, it's rude.

Haven't you ever been called into a manager's office, only to have them be constantly interrupted every few minutes by a phone call, pager beep, email, or somebody coming by while you tried to explain something detailed to them? Was this a practical use of time for either of you? Is this something you would want to use as an example of a normal conversation?
Aristotle has thought of himself as a "political" being, but he perceived the world and the meaning of "political" in a very different way from me and you.
While I've not used it yet myself, 'edge-side includes' seem really appropriate for such problems -- offloading the caching of the large, unchanging part to a very efficient raw HTTP cache, only passing through customization hits for a tiny subset of the page (and even allowing those to be cached and invalidated separately). See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes
It would be nice if the interface could walk you through those first few steps you need to take when you're getting introduced to a version control system. Some explanation would be nice. A "Pull" function would also be handy, not to mention some graphics to show where you are in the tree.

The biggest thing that would be needed, however, are some better error messages. Yes, "non fast-forward" is true and descriptive, but a little short for beginners. They are left thinking things like "What is a fast-forward? Why isn't it a fast-forward? Can you just make it work?".

I've looked into changing those error messages (and maybe making the system more internationalized) but they are hard-coded in git's source code, and are not easy to track down.
Ruby on Rails and the importance of being stupid
"Look I'm a really important and busy person. I don't have time to be nice. Keep it short because I have a ton of meetings."

The only thing I don't see is why I should desire a meeting with this guy in the first place. And whether or not his blog is good place to post instructions on how to properly meet him. What about the proper protocol when meeting me? What if his protocol and my protocol clash?
Web Sites Help Bring Together Entrepreneurs and Investors
It's along the same lines as "A programmer's view of the universe, Part 2" post about MarioKart.

The point of the whole Dawkins/COMA bit is to show that the universe is yet another embedded system from which data can flow in and out. The two human boys being teleported into the virtual tour is akin to Luigi's kart being "zapped" out of a video game and into some other process space. The odds of either occurring are astronomical, but the singularity, being a sufficently smart programmer of the universe, intervenes to make the former happen.

If there is a main point I guess it would be that what lies beyond the boundary of the universe is unknowable and stranger than human imagination.
Can someone explain the entropy and thermodynamics bit?

He appears to be arguing against the concept of calories in minus calories burned equals calories stored, but he lost me.

He's got "entropy" in his blog name so you'd think this is his area, however, it sounds fishy to me.
I agree with imp regarding the site design and layout. I am a graduate student and have been looking for a software/service similar to papers for mac (http://mekentosj.com/papers/) for windows. This looks like a useful service, not entirely what I want but a decent start. I will definitely try the free version and will post my opinion.
It looks like your marketing/PR guy did good work. I'm impressed by the amount of press you've garnered.
I know where you're coming from with the agile thing. Agile techniques have a lot of advantages, but they're just one way to run a successful project - there are other ways.

The reality of working for clients who need accurate estimates up front and to know exactly what they'll get for that money demands having a spec up front. Agile works better in situations where you're your own client (such as with a startup).

Ultimately, the important aspect is building the app/site the client wanted for a price they can afford to pay. When the budget is tight a spec works really well to push the iterations to a paper stage where they are cheap to make.

Thanks for your summary and comments.
The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics?
Send me an e-mail at dp4man@gmail.com if u want to hear about our project
What do you mean "modulate insulin?" Insulin is produced in response to elevated blood sugar. Modulating it would, presumably, leave you with high blood sugar, all other things being equal. Diabetes mellitus is the syndrome of high blood sugar.

If you want to become diabetic, take some streptozotocin :)