skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thank you for the suggestion of HARO. I will definitely check it out.
> a concealed carry permit is very easy to obtain

Hell, I'm a MA resident, and I've got a NH LTC. I applied by mail, and included a xerox of my MA LTC.
That's one of the problems: Inline blocks are fundamentally incompatible with significant whitespace, or at least no one has thought of a good way to combine the two.
What is it? What language does it use? What OS is it for?
If you only use the first 4-8 characters of your md5 hash, can't you just convert that from hex to base 10 and get an int?
> "Some" say? Who say?

"Some say" is code. It means "I, the journalist, think so, and I bet that I could find at least one person to agree with me, therefore I will insert my political bias into the story in a way that isn't totally obvious to a naive reader".
You could, but then you need to implement collision avoidance when creating new records. Database sequences are guaranteed to be unique.
Ramit's stuff is cool. Also on mixergy is the interview with Tim Ferriss who got his book "Four Hour Work Week" written about by tons of bloggers.

http://blog.mixergy.com/tim-ferriss/
Another rule of thumb for a good, catchy title: Include both "Google" and "Evil."
Joel would not be amused:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper...

I'm with him on this one. I'd hate to work in a place like that. Dear Lord.
awesome stuff thorax! Seems like you guys have some good ideas that lend themselves to being talked about naturally.

Getting new APIs or new fads is good, but they have to be fitting. Getting buried in all of the trends going on might be harder than standing out in the crowd as something totally different. But then nobody will find you with searches and other trend word searches. I'll definitely keep looking into hooking into trends when/if it makes sense.
You can think of it as a CMS to a degree as well as a framework. It's written in PHP. Any OS that supports PHP should work. I've only fully tested it on Linux and some preliminary testing on Windows. I would love to have other contribute to the project.
and "Build something people want to talk about"
It can mean other things, but I can't think of any justification more savory for that sort of blithe vagueness.
Awesome publications. I will take some time to read them after I get some work done today.
How is the HN community as a whole different from your social circle?
For example, is the HN community more technical? Does it care more about marketing?
Well, it must be evolution-x day. Acting stupid is unconscious attempt to invite a lek. A lek is a display of males before females. A woman makes a stupid remark to see which males give stupid replies, and if she is lucky, intelligent ones. I always suspected we were being manipulated, but I didnt realize how easily.

My GF doesn't do that. She's decided to keep me around and doesnt allow any illusions as to who is the smart one.
In theory, excerpts are great. I've been sold on products with them. But they can be dangerous, too.

It's like software demos -- you put pressure on the end-user to download, install and then figure out your software. I know I don't have 2 hours to figure out if your software will do what I need it to!

Whereas -- if you create a screencast demonstrating the power of your software or products, infomercial style, it has much more power to convert folks to buyers.

So if Amy really wanted to wow the masses, she could give some visual demonstrations (possibly in the form of a screencast) of the power of her ebook. Few people do this and it could be a real winner for her!
A mentor of mine once wrote that 'politics is the stench that comes off a decaying religion'. Neither social institution has much of a plan for adapting to innovation, other than asserting the right to control it.
Yeah, I feel you on the text. We need some nice mini screenshots of the different ways this works. It's hard to show with static images in a dynamic real time app. Maybe we need to talk to a designer.
Hard work, email bloggers & reports, but sometimes you get lucky.

A CNet reporter quoted me for a front page Google Wave story and linked our site. Instant traffic spike.
Microsoft Details How It'll Cripple 'Windows 7 Starter' For Netbooks
good point about PR being the primary distribution. Ideally nobody wants that. If you can ever glance at the whiteboard at the YC office, it shows a dominating spike in traffic for techcrunch coverage, and then a sharp dropoff... after that it's all up to your product. So initially, good exposure, but you need a product that counts.
I GOT A BROWN ZUNE
In that vein, show some product. What does "collaborative shopping" look like on a screen? Bonus points if you show non-clipart people using your product in a way that makes sense to your users. Would they also be on a phone call w/ each other, for instance?

I find that videos are becoming a popular way to tell that story - if you choose to go that route, keep it under ~ 3 mins.
At least take the time to read the post ;) It's about the importance of a decentralized Wave ecosystem.
couldn't you argue that you can get as many connections without going for an MBA? Or is that one of your suggestions?
that's a good article too. thanks for linking that.
Ask NH: How Techmeme is built?
How do you think it's built to be a tech news aggregator?
(this relates to another earlier questions of mine regarding building an aggregator)
I'm more amused by the mention of the so-called "streets of downtown Keene". Keene hardly has a "downtown" by most people's standards.
Point taken on goals. However I can't see (measurably) how feminism has been terrible for everyone?

When you look at pay differences, military service, voting, health, etc, feminism seems to definitely have helped.
you may translate your slides (if at all you're using it) and share with us ...
lol, I was debating including definition 1 instead of saying 'perpendicular,' but I chickened out.

But you are correct, sir ;-)
Agreed. Sadly, Shaw (ab)uses it fairly often.
"omits the point that strings are way more expensive to look up than integers"

So what? We're talking microseconds.

I take it a step further than OP. Every data base record has 2 IDs, an internal sequential one and an external one. The external one is cross-referenced to the internal one, which is never seen by human eyes. So every read is actually 2 reads, which is way more expensive still. I have been doing this for years and have never seen any noticeable degradation.

The reason I started this has nothing to do with security. It's so that I can change any key on any data base at any time without actually changing the primary key and without a conversion. (You'd be surprised how often you need to do this in commercial applications.)
The only problem with this is, Palm’s never been a hardware company that anyone’s really cared about. They have been the furthest thing from innovative since circa-2003 — their hardware has always been second rate at best and it doesn’t seem to be changing now. Couple that with the nation’s underdog carrier at a $299 price-point (before rebate), and we’re not sure how many people are going to be lined up overnight, yet we’re pretty confident once people are able to play a real unit themselves, there will be more than a lot of happy Palm Pre customers.

That's kinda the feeling I'm getting too. As a Sprint customer who is eligible to upgrade, I'm really excited - finally a WebKit based browser in a Sprint phone! However, I wish Palm could have been more competitive - on price, on applications, and on hardware. Not that it's terrible or anything on any of those fronts. It's just that it would be nicer if it were a tad more competitive when compared with the iPhone. Would a glass screen have killed them? Maybe a preliminary SDK for games? Maybe not require the rebate?

Well, I'm excited! New phone!
Except, do you doubt its truth? Humans are rationalization engines. Communities will go to great lengths to prove that everything about their culture is good.
Ask HN: How do background check sites get their data?
I went on one and it had my address and email (both accurate). Even worse, a reverse lookup on my cell looked pretty accurate too.

*Note I only saw the preview pages...but the asteriked details looked accurate
New research reveals how meditation changes the brain
Yet another Indian invention, ascribed to the middle east through medieval ignorance. The wootz steel is the key.

See: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/647868/wootz-steel
It was plagiarized, not pirated.
> It's almost always a mistake to accept an offer to stay after you've accepted an offer somewhere else. It's almost always a mistake to make an offer to stay to someone who has accepted an offer somewhere else.

Why?
Python 3 removed old, deprecated APIs, but did not change any existing APIs. Probably the most extreme re-organization was the urllib/urllib2 merger, which was at its core just removing old stuff. Because Python is dynamically typed, the "protocol" of a library is extremely important, and the semantics of existing functions/classes are almost never changed.

Of Zed's complaints, I feel that two are misguided (time handling seems quite reasonable to me, and I've never seen an easier documentation system than Sphinx).

I think applying the "del" keyword to objects in a container is a mistake in the language, but that's how it was designed, so it probably wouldn't have been changed in the 2 -> 3 transition. It certainly won't be changed now -- the best that can be hoped for is for its use to be discouraged in the documentation.

Install/Uninstall of modules is fairly easy, but requires all concerned parties to work together. Otherwise you end up with half-installed, broken modules. There are PEPs in progress to work on this, but it's a social/political problem rather than a technical one.

Python's file-manipulation APIs are an ongoing calamity.
When you refer to a machine needing a 'sense of self' it sounds as if you are referring to consciousness. To an extent you could maybe say even a thermostat has a limited form of consciousness in that it holds a belief that a room is at a specific temperature and it is able to effect this through its own output, functioning as a cybernetic system.

I think you could certainly give such a system the impression of having feelings by implementing some kind of stimulus and reward process, but I think that needs to come second to appearing intelligent first (albeit in a rather emotionless fashion), but yes it would make the UI much more friendly.

I like the idea of trying to mimic the human brain as a path to AI, as it would give the system the ability to theoretically cope with a massive set of problems.
Indeed, most towns in NH aren't much more than an intersection or two.
I was excited that maybe there would be a phone with the PalmOS calendar/todo/notes I still wish I could use (really REALLY don't care about physics engine based UIs) and a 3g data connection. Instead it looks to be another shoddy knockoff of the iPhone. About the only thing it has going for it is the form factor, but even then I wish it wasn't a slider. Android at the very least has hardware independence in mind, where exactly is Palm headed?
this is just fine. you are only at risk if your db libs/frameworks have no checks for if collision does some day occur. For example, as an id being a primary key in a db table, your db will cough up an error if you get collision, but will your ruby/python/blub libs/frameworks handle it gracefully?
dpifke, you're right that it's definitely slower and more space consuming to index and query 32 character strings vs. ints. However, it's probably inconsequential for most applications, especially if your queries are simple SELECTs and INSERTS, as most web apps are doing.
If you go to Best Buy, you don't need the rebate. You just buy it for $199.
Using database OIDs as publicly accessible identifiers is a neat idea, one I haven't tried.

Looking at the Postgres docs (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/datatype-oid.html) they discourage the use of OIDs, going so far as to say the default in future versions is not to create OIDs for user-created tables.

Also, this would mean that a dump/restore of your database results in invalidating all your identifiers.

What RDBMS do you do this on and have you run into any problems?

EDIT: Sure enough, in modern Postgres, these are disabled by default. Additionally, they appear to be sequentially assigned:

dev01=> select *,oid from test;
test_id | test_string | oid
---------+-----------------+-------
1 | blah | 29837
2 | blahblahblah | 29838
3 | xxxblahblahblah | 29839
Definitely, especially as its such an 'analogue' problem, maybe digital computers aren't the right job for this.
"pretty much not likely to create a collision"

Depends on your definition of "pretty much not likely". It may be far more likely than you suspect. Remember that in a group of 30 people, there's a 50% chance 2 of them have the same birthday. Not exactly intuitive.

Also remember that as your data base grows, the probability of collisions grows geometrically.

Here's hoping that your app does so well that you'll need millions of IDs.
Credit rating agencies (experian, equifax, trans union) collect all the data whenever you apply for a credit card, and then re-sell it to other businesses -- this is the data that experian sells with many of its demographic products, for example. They also have metrics for your income, purchasing history, etc. Someone can buy a list of email addresses of people with income > $x who have purchased a car in the past 6 months, etc.

There is also a way that they obtain data via public records, etc., simply by requesting it from each municipality.
Whether you agree with them or not, you'll find many people who feel any drug dependence is a "wrong" based on their own values, or more practically, from considering societal costs.
How long could a black hole remain in the center of the earth?
If people shift from eating beef to eating beans aren't they simply redirecting the methane emissions from one rectum to another? (In a manner of speaking).
Agreed. Golson does a faceplant on the definition of the word "arrogance." Usually I can piece together what word they were trying to use . Not this time.
I personally like how Haskell can combine the two. You can have:

myFunc = do
this
that
other

Or equivalently:

myFunc = do { this; that; other; }
I never said there weren't Indian Jews. Just that I haven't met many of them. There's is a difference in the two statements.

And its not so much, "you know, getting out, and stuff", but rather just the demographics and location of the town where I go to college (ie: where I spend most of the year). Its more rural then suburb, so not a lot of people move to the area.
It's a fools errand to spend resources on prosecution that's going to be overturned. That's probably the position of Waxman and Obama.

Whoa, really? If the Supreme Court said "Porn is obscenity; it is not protected speech," you think Obama would demand that RedTube be shut down? Can you imagine anything like "We must stop these purveyors of sexually debased materials" ever emerging from Obama's mouth?
In 20 years real programmers will program in Visual Basic and Quiche eaters/script kiddies will just go brain-to-binary with a SQUID.
Easy. The rule is that every time you see : like this:

bla bla foo:
x
y
z

It's the same as this:

bla bla foo
x
y
end
z

i.e. insert `end` when the indentation ends.
Could we move Mars or Venus into Earth's orbit and live there?
First rule of PR: Know your audience. IMO you are marketing your site all wrong if you go after the HN/Digg/Reddit crowds, which generally tend to be more techy.

You should be hitting the websites which would want to use this service, deal sites, shopping forums, price comparing forums, etc. Attack the forums/discussion areas in those sites, which are very large. If the shoppers from those sites aren't interested in your service, then you may have a problem with execution/the idea behind your website.

Again, HN/tech crunch/digg/reddit is the wrong audience for your idea.
FASTWEB Race announces Steve Souders and Ben Rushlo as Judges
Steve Souders, Google, and Ben Rushlo, sponsored by Keynote Systems, have been announced as the judges for the FASTWEB race.
How much does this really matter anyway? If your app is devoid of content or users won't it be obvious even without seeing a "low" auto-incrementing ID?
Python is relatively consistent with regards to appending/popping/inserting/removing:

a=[]
dir(a)
'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove', 'reverse', 'sort'

help(a.remove)
remove(...)
L.remove(value) -- remove first occurrence of value

help(a.pop)
pop(...)
L.pop([index]) -> item -- remove and return item at index (default last)

append(...)
L.append(object) -- append object to end

insert(...)
L.insert(index, object) -- insert object before index
There was an article on here not too long ago about how moving to new offices tends to kill startups. The theory being that if you've got time to worry about planing the perfect office, you're no longer concentrating on building the perfect app. Or something like that.
I implement double IDs in my own code, not in any built-in function of any DBMS. You're right to be suspicious.
Fetching Friday - Resources, #FollowFriday, PageRank & SEO | Kikolani
And subprocess is available in 2.6, too. It looks like a well-designed API and certainly makes it easy to run external filters on data. For example, to get the output of 'tidy -q' on a string s:

proc = subprocess.Popen(['tidy', '-q'], stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
(tidyout, tidyerr) = proc.communicate(input=s)
if proc.returncode != 0:
...
Scam Design - 25 Examples And Worst Practices
For sure, and we agree.

We're not looking to convert on this audience (HN/techcrunch/digg/reddit etc) - we just launched and we think feedback like this from really smart people is super useful. We're still gathering information before we feel like we can present an easy-to-use package for consumers.

It's harder on price comparison forums to ask our customers what they want and get a conversation started when they're looking to discuss the best deals on digital cameras. We tell them about the product, and hope they try it out. If they don't reach out to submit feedback, it doesn't help us as much in improving.
The article succeeds at drawing interesting, often poetic parallels between two unrelated concepts.

It does not succeed at giving reasons to ban pornography.
Yeah, our feedback hopes for HN is technical / development of a product kind of feedback. It's totally true that our audience is different then that of HN. We are definitely going to target the correct audience soon. We've done a bit, but still working on squeezing as much out of HN as we can first ;)
Your point is well made if you believe that a mental illness and its treatment are comparable to a physical illness and its treatment. But I have a lot more faith in the medical establishment's ability to treat prostate cancer than I do in it's ability to treat something like schizophrenia.

Now, you can probably point to various statistics to demonstrate that the mental health community is doing something right, but from my personal experience their approach is completely wrong and I want to offer an alternative viewpoint to what you'll get from the pamphlet in the doctor's office.

Depression very clearly runs in my family. And I've personally had a long history of depression as well, psychotic depression at some points (hearing voices). So, in your view, I'd probably be an excellent candidate for having my condition treated like a physical disease (genetic basis, serious risk profile). And that's what I did after a couple of years. I went to a psychiatrist, took various drugs, and received therapy. And it accomplished nothing positive whatsoever: the drugs made me stupid and slow; when my friends and extended family learned of my 'disease' they began treating me differently (there really is a stigma); and I had real issues getting health insurance further down the line.

But most importantly, the whole message behind my treatment was "you are suffering from a DISEASE - it's like cancer - an occurrence of nature and beyond your control." But, in my view, that's not the solution - the solution is to come to terms with who you are, tell yourself that most things are under your control, and recognize that the failure to deal with your problems are your own fault. The day I started 'getting better' was when I quit the meds cold-turkey, cut off communication with my psychiatrists, and took responsibility for my own behavior and mental state. That was several years ago and my only regret is that I ever medicalized my condition in the first place.
i guess if you wanna use the term black hole loosely...

pretty sure stable black holes have to be of a certain mass. like you'd have to get a couple stars worth of mass compressed down to the size of the center of the earth. at which point the earth wouldn't last a second
"[Free Staters hope] to end the use of parking meters"

So they want to eliminate user fees in favor of free access to community property? That sounds like socialism, not libertarianism. In most places, parking fees should be higher to eliminate shortages, as well as the extra traffic and pollution caused by people circling the block to find an open spot.
Pay With Facebook Is In The Wild
kingsley's right. My impressions (these echo others'):

1) Get rid of all that text. Make the search box huge and pre-fill it with something useful. Don't put a bunch of words underneath explaining what the user should fill it with.

2) ~30sec video in _female_ voice of buying something together. Make sure the first ("preview") frame is a picture that shows why your product is awesome.

3) Colors(!) on the front page. Looks like it was designed by a tasteful developer, rather than a tasteful designer (if I'm wrong, then tell the designer to get a bit crazier).

4) No elephants. Seriously. Nobody wants to be an elephant. Even 'gear nerd' men don't want to be elephants. Unless .. you're selling elephants?

5) Integrate with FB/Twitter/Whatever. Put the logos on your _homepage_ so that everybody knows you're 140ch-compatible. This will increase the buzz factor.

6) If your site does badass technical stuff, write some technical blogs about them and get them out to the relevant humangregators. Opinion-makers troll technical posts to find the newest cool stuff.
Reminders by SMS using a clean UI
A simple, elegant app to schedule reminders by SMS or email.
Even if flying cars were cheap and easy to make, would we want them? They're cool and amazing, but in real life they might be impractical.

So generally when talking about the future, maybe we predict inventions that make for cool easily understandable stories, instead useful or plausible inventions. That's why flying cars were predicted but the internet wasn't.

If you're not even going to be alive when the time of your prediction comes, why would you bother to think hard about it and make an odd, abstract, unfashionable prediction instead of a cool story about flying cars?
They are also more comfortable with, and probably overly confident in, formal systems.
Facebook had like 5-7 offices in downtown Palo Alto. Now they have one.

Beyond that, they're not really a startup anymore: they have over 1,000 employees.
The article spelled Gandhi wrong and now it's spreading through the comments like a virus.
How about when the function is being passed as an argument to a function? Does the ')' just go on the next line by itself? What if it's not the last argument? There are many opportunities for ambiguity and/or ugliness.
How does the first form work out as an inline function argument? I'm not familiar with Haskell's syntax.
I also enjoyed 7th guest a heckuva lot more. Then again, I was 10.
Don't bother with the ask-HN post; just see a @#$%! doctor! While a lot less alarming than the TLP, this sounds vaguely like bipolar disorder, but you're not going to get help or a diagnosis on an internet forum, even if anyone who reads your post is a qualified psychologist (which I'm not).