skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hacker news / newmogul is pretty much where I find the majority of my news these days. If it's important and relevant enough, it'll probably be here.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply they were mutually exclusive in any way.
He should also do it to disqualify others. I'm sure some will like it and some won't.

If he does it, hopefully his bold statement reflects the real him — it's not just an experiment. It's a great strategy when executed well.
Passenger fixes faulty airliner
I'm a little skeptical about all this.

From:

http://blog.batchblue.com/tag/tj-sondermann/

This smacks of astroturfing:

Slide 38: TJ Sondermann (@sondernagle) is the closest thing BatchBlue has to a mascot. Not only is he a great friend and full of great ideas, he actually came up with the concept of our wildly popular Twitter tee shirt (shown on Slide 39).

Account made 4 days ago first submission promotes FANTASTIC service at affiliated company.
I am talking about continuations and workflows -> these concepts are not that straight forward, especially if you are coming in from imperative programming background.
Where can you get two weeks of iTunes App Store data?
The only original source I read is techcrunch. Everything else I get through links found on technology/programming subreddits, hackernews, and a few forums
FYI I'm having problems decompressing this file. Could you re-post it? or alternatively throw the code up on something like github?
Has anyone here used BatchBlue? Any feedback on the service itself?
The problem with break and continue is that they only apply to the inner most loop. Unless you change certain values, you're only going to reenter the same loop immediately. In that case - goto is actually a cleaner solution.
Notice how everything which is technically "too cheap to meter" gets metered anyway. Text messages, ring tones, etc. are all examples of products with a cost of production approaching zero, which consumers are charged for simply because it is possible to do so.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690202
Ruby Best Practices: A Review
But HN has become so big. It not logical to think that everyone will be interested by everything now.
I'm sure that's the same guy who posted the link to HN, but the article he linked to is from some fitness consultant's blog. I guess I don't see the problem.
Online Ad Spending Rises At Double-Digit Rates
As a hiring manager, I can honestly say if that crossed my desk I would probably pitch it. Way too busy and takes too much time to get the desired info out of it, especially for someone who claims "UI Design".

I will also tell you from my own experience, that I'm a more than a tad hesitant about college students and recent graduates who are heavy-handed with the "CEO, co-founder, and entrepreneur" titles and interests on their resumes. Not to be too harsh, but since when does a "society", which in most cases is just a loose grouping of people with similar interests, have or need a "CEO".

Get some actual experience under your belt and list some bona-fide measurable accomplishments on your resume (this is generic advice, not just targeted at you). There are many people who are legends in their own mind, but if you list bottom-line things you have actually done, that will come through on your resume. There is no benefit, IMO, to over-hyping glorified titles.

Much of the data on here tells me very little. You appear to have more OSX skills than linux skills, but relative to what? Linus Torvalds, or my grandmother?

I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like over the same period of time you put as much effort into "Firewall" as you did "classes". Were you a slacker in class, or are you good at managing your time such that you could handle both.

The resume format may be considered stale and dated, but from a hiring perspective I can tell you that it the best way to try and make impartial comparisons of people in regards to work experience, education, and other factors. This format is highly devoid of content that I could use to make a decision about your applicability for a job, which is not a good idea for a resume.
Not Heroku's, and certainly not a cache in a client's browser or their network squid cache.
I understand this point, but I kept them hired in my example to illustrate how extra production value is realized when systems are automated like this. I do believe that those 3 employees would be let go. My point is that those 3 employees could go on to be productive in some other capacity in a situation where automation can't yet replace them. They would probably work for another company, but the point remains that there are now 3 extra workers in society.
I recently asked myself the same question, and I ended up settling on SBCL (Common Lisp).

Emacs coupled with SLIME provides the best development environment I have yet experienced. For me, the greatest downside is that the code I end up with is often quite system-specific.
I've used both PayPal and FPS. PayPal allows you to get on your feet quickly, but limits what you can eventually do. FPS has a massive feature set, coupled with a massively complex API.

Amazon needs to tackle the complexity issues. FPS has a thousand error states, and payments fail all the time with little to no explanation. Good luck with the resolution process, too. Here's my most recent attempt at getting some help on failed transactions: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/145070/fps_error.png
I would also suggest http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H... as it not only teaches Haskell, but also Scheme (as the tutorial covers the construction of a Scheme interpreter)
Developer Contest: Win a Netbook and $300 in Heroku credit
Pretty cool story.

I once fixed a faulty first class seat on an NWA red-eye flight. The metal pin that held it in the upright position broke, causing it to fall all the way in the lap of the person directly behind it. Was an almost-full flight and they were going to have to get a duct-tape maintenance guy to bodger it up. I managed to secure it with a seatbelt extender and something else (bit of a ballpoint pen I think).

Anyway, was kind of cool, and earned me a free bottle of wine to carry off the plane, on top of the regular drinks consumed on the flight.
I love Outlook Web Access in IE. It doesn't fully work in other browsers. But in IE, it seems faster and has pretty much the same features as the desktop version.
I use http://friendfeed.com/ for crowdsourced, or more accurately, friendsourced news.
From the pwdhash page: "Occasionally, users want to login to their web accounts on machines where they cannot install browser extensions (e.g. at Internet cafes). In this case users can connect to our web site
https://www.pwdhash.com
where they are presented with one of the following forms, depending on whether their browser supports clipboard operations via script."

(Of course, copy and paste is not exactly convenient in mobile browsers, but it's at least possible on most newer ones.)
This doesn't seem like an outlandish bet to me. It seems to me that Facebook has, up to this point, spent much more time and energy on their core product rather than improving advertisements. Six months ago the ads were totally worthless, now I notice they are beginning to tailor their ads to my interests and my group of friends. If they continue optimizing the ads those revenues should increase.

There is also a virtually untapped market on Facebook for virtual objects. The gift system does exist, but I feel needs improvement. Social networking sites in Asia make the bulk of their money off of this feature, not ads. If FB beefs up this aspect of their business I think 2 billion by 2014 is a reasonable goal.

All that being said, the sentiment that "he is selling something" seems reasonable. They could be ramping up for an IPO or, more likely, going for another round of private investments to fuel growth.
Could you make a page that is the exact opposite? Non Hacker Hacker News?
The Salesman And The Statistician
Amazing, uplifting story! Thanks for sharing.
Researchers Test New 'Space Internet' System on International Space Station
I read a number of "Planet" blog aggregators run by specific organizations or projects or individuals, e.g.:

http://planet.gnome.org/

http://planet.debian.org/

http://planet.mozilla.org/

http://planet.intertwingly.net/ (Sam Ruby's personal reading list)

They have an interesting mix of code-related news and personal blog posts.
Well, technically Clojure is a lisp, but it does indeed depart from the heavyweight lisp legacy as represented by Common Lisp. And portability is much easier when all your libraries are in JVM. :-)

Scala started earlier than Clojure and has a bigger community around it. Clojure is clean and grows quickly, it has a very good potential. Besides, it has a strong and multifaceted support for parallel (multicore) programming. Both Scala and Clojure run on top of JVM and interop with it.

Haskell has had a strong following in academia for quite a while now. Newer languages borrow from it.

I have not tried F# which, as far as I understand, is a kind of ML on .NET. Its community seems to be smaller, but it may be due to the usual animosity some people feel regarding anything that comes out of Microsoft. Reportedly the language is well designed.
He has a point, but anyone who has ever built something non-trivial from start to finish already knows this. It's the subtleties, not the broad concept, that drains time.
It is the same concept posted in Deviantart. The image was posted in 2007

http://dizzia.deviantart.com/art/Curriculum-Vitae-PDF-690509...

The idea of a "visual resume" is really good especially if you are targeting a data visualization job
If he was only a "quant" though, i.e. an analyst and a trader, why in the world would they give him access to the source code?

Sounds to me like he was in fact a programmer.
Yes, the nyse, nasdaq and such rent floor space for systems.
You get a high speed(low-latency), unencrypted (low latency), unpassword protected (low-latency), low-latency connection
with very low-latency characteristics directly into trading engines.

They go to great lengths to ensure low-latency performance.
Currently there'll be tons of hifi hedge funds upgrading
to nahalem processors and measuring how much faster each individual instruction is. Cutting fiber optic wire to the exact length to lower latencies, then measuring to make sure
they don't have any retransmits due to bounceback, etc.

If you're able to reliably make $0.01 on each trade you'll
be more than willing to spend hundreds of millions on hardware. Microseconds matter, because they add up to milliseconds.
the original article:

http://blog.last.fm/2009/04/06/mapreduce-bash-script
Javascript is a great language (and widely misused, alas). However, calling it a functional language is a very big stretch (unlike lisp).
It is always good to make raw data available to the masses. Nice work!
this reminded me of nicholas felton's annual reports:

http://feltron.com/index.php
I said mathematica did not have tab completion, I do most of my school work in matlab I know it has tab completion :) but it does have a very stupid limitation that a function is a separate file.

edit: by stupid I mean can get annoying matlab really wouldn't work any other way
...a baseball bat, which while possible of inflicting terminal injuries isn't quite as good at it, lowering the number of deaths.

The analogy still holds :-)

edit: I mean to say literally that GOTOs certainly are useful, but are far easier to create spaghetti code with than something much safer like functions. It's a cost/benefit analysis.
Paypal has brought very little innovation since they were acquired by eBay. I'd be surprised if this suddenly changed.
I don't have any inside knowledge, but if you were Google, wouldn't you at least factor it into the equation?

We use Google Analytics. I noticed Google Bot, but not other buts, has increased crawl frequency steadily with our recent traffic spike, but the number of visitors from search engines is still quite low at this point. This correlation hints that Google may be using traffic data to prioritize crawl rates and it would seem a logical extension to prioritize search results.
Checked out Newmogul. Love it. I really love the arc layout. Very little wasted space.
Medieval Mosques Illuminated by Math
The best solution seems to be plug-in hybrid cars with batteries. They move the power generation problem from cars to power plants, where nuclear, solar or some unforeseen future technology can handle it. More importantly, you can actually buy them today, and they can fall back on gasoline when exceeding the range of their batteries, so drivers don't have to worry about getting stuck like they do with all-electric cars. If the US automotive fleet were entirely converted to plug-in hybrids, then the remaining demand for gasoline would be small enough to supply with synthetic fuel, which can in principle be made carbon-neutral as well.
Ask HN: Best 'Unknown' Tech/Web blogs
Hi HN, i'm looking for tech blogs that you love but that most other people don't know about...It can be yours too btw.
I too settled on SBCL for a while, but then looked around a bit wider. Clojure is an intriguing development. I recommend that you look at it, both the language and the community. It has a good promise, borrowing the best from the older lisps and leaving behind the unnecessary legacy.

So, unless you need to support or interact with past Lisp code, I think Clojure may be a better tool for most of us. YMMV, as usual.
"And we haven't even touched things like... internationalization"

Well from one of the recent podcasts it sounds like Jeff is set against doing internationalization. And Joel is showing admirable restraint in not strangling him.
Sure, but then we're down to arguing whether a language should be designed to constrain bad programmers or empower good ones. And quite apart from the general arguments one can make (for example, that bad programmers will make a mess no matter what), it's clear that Javascript has become a major platform for modern applications. To constrain the growth of the entire class of web apps in order to allegedly limit the spaghetti produced by $programmer is a poor tradeoff, I'd say.
Notes about Haskell:

It's strange, but Haskell is more difficult to read than write. This is because most code on e.g. Hackage uses some very complicated gymnastics involving Applicative, Arrows, or whatever. So it's hard to learn from other people's programs.

Also, a warning: learning Haskell might screw with your ability to write code in other languages! It took me two weeks before I stopped making every line of Python a lambda.
That goes without saying. You post literally every TechCrunch article here.
Great headline, and I cannot enumerate the number of times that I have done this, both under managerial pressure and totally of my own volition.
Marc Andreessen’s Burgeoning Blogging Empire: Invests In Talking Points Memo
The original discussion here included the study's author: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=634692
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs as a jumping-off point; http://etill.net/projects/dirac_theora_evaluation/ for a flawed but quick analysis.

In brief, Theora is more open-ended (supporting up to terapixel resolutions!) but at the price of being far less optimized or well-supported for acquisition and delivery needs today. h.264, while processor-intensive and subject to long-term limitations delivers outstanding performance right now and is widely supported.

Also, Theora brands itself as ideal for web delivery with limited bandwidth leading to graceful rather than abrupt degradation, which is great, but of declining utility as bandwidth and reliability increase. It isn't pushed as a great choice for high-quality delivery, leading to a lack of awareness among content-providers who would rather use use h264 for everything from blu-ray to Youtube.

Now, that doesn't mean Theora has no future - as it matures it will become more desirable as a supported option, and the long-term architecture will help with that. Right now, however, it doesn't offer any significant technical benefit, like massively smaller compression or massively better image representation, compared to competitors. Making film and video is expensive and the patent licensing costs are such a tiny fraction of that cost that content providers and distributors really don't care. To them, Theora is a solution in search of a problem (indeed, many have never even heard of it). There is no economic incentive to deliver in this format, so they won't.

tl;dr programmers care about Theora, video people don't.
Introducing the Hive Mind
Me too. But there was a suggestion floating around the Internet that eBay management is "tired" of eBay (which many would argue they have ruined with their changes in the last few years) and looking to PayPal to be their main cash cow. In which case, they do have to at least keep up with their competitors.
LA Metro API
That's what labels are for. I think you can do

loop: for(i=0;i<10;i++){
for(...) {
break loop;
}
}
I've been 90% done for years.
How Michael Jackson's Thriller changed music business
I can't help but notice the attitude you show when filling out the support form. The guy on the other end reading it probably isn't the one at fault for the lack of clarity in the error message. Answering messages like yours all day long really sucks.

Cryptic error messages are frustrating, but there's no need to be nasty.
I disagree with this. At least from my own perspective, numbered list imply one thing: that I can expect a specific number of items.

In fact, in the given example, the non-numbered version of the title sounds like it should be more authoritative. It goes from an interpretation of, "a list of 20 common mistakes," to one of, "a list of /the/ common mistakes." I.e., to me at least, the second option has an implication of being a list of all the common mistakes, while the former implies that this while this is a list of 20 mistakes, there could be more.

It is the adjective ("amazing," "killer," "must-have," etc.) present in the title and NOT the number that conveys authority, completeness, etc.

Perhaps I am the exception, though, and not the rule.
How To Increase Site Performance Through A/B Split
The Unemployment Timebomb is Quietly Ticking
Agreed. I don't know who you are, but I've seen this blog four or five times in the last week and I've liked almost everything I read.
Indeed, we have gotten tremendously more efficient at metering things, even things that aren't being charged for.

The idea that something would be more expensive to meter than to provide is clearly not of the digital age.
I'd rather have the mechanic fly on the same plane than remain on the tarmac any day.
Good point. Personally, I think that articles describing how you do X (and why) - assuming the writer has some history of successfully doing X - are more valuable than articles that try to define how X should be done. And even more valuable are articles about an actual thing you've done, and how you went about it. More show, less tell.
Numbers in the title of a blog post reliably indicate bad writing, because they indicate that the writer used a template rather than original thought. I would prefer not to see "N ways to X" articles on HN at all.
IKEA does not have to be "in the philanthropic business" to benefit the countries in which they have operations. The fact that they make a profit does not preclude other people (the landlords, contractors and employees in the post you replied to, among others) from benefiting. Economics is not a zero-sum game. Wealth can be created. More at http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/04/wealth_creatio...
If you love SASS you should check out Compass as well, I use them together and it makes my CSS so much easier to work with!!

http://www.compass-style.org
I think that we'd be better with tagging than categories per se. Give people a finate list of tags to choose from and people could customize their views pretty easily.
This post feels a lot like he reworded http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-ha... but with less insight & effort and inserted a couple drawings instead.
For one thing, to use Amazon payments person to person, you had to hook a bank account to your account. Which makes it basically useless - most people won't, they like using paypal credit card based cashes.
Great feedback Sean. I wish everyone in this community, including myself, were as willing to help.
BT Backs Off From Tracking Internet Customers
It's my understanding that they started out that way in Europe, which is how they got popular. But then somehow the carriers started charging for them. I don't understand how this happened, and I suspect it warrants an antitrust investigation — surely any carrier that offered free SMS with a slightly higher per-minute voice rate would attract a lot of customers who made voice calls once every month or two, and clean up. So I suspect price-fixing.
To me, it gets the same point across more simply, clearly, and quickly.
Not necessarily. My phone company is MetroPCS. CDMA/flash phones only, weak selection, you pay full price for the phone, and coverage outside major cities is poor or non-existent. They expand features and coverage area slowly: it's not good if you want the latest and greatest. They sublet the Verizon network. That's the bad.

edit: I can get out of area coverage, but it requires prepayment and is expensive. However, I only need it once or twice a year.

However, there's no contract, you pay at the beginning of the month so there's no bill, and it's flat rate. I get unlimited local, national and international calling (to about 100 countries), along with unlimited voicemail and text for $56 a month. Not only is it cheap, administration takes me about 5 minutes per month - the time to go to their website, click 'pay my bill', and save/print the receipt page. I've had one serious customer service problem in 5 years, and that was due to a local store trying to slap on an unauthorized service charge after I replaced a damaged phone. I called the company support line and got the money back.

mPCS is now the 6th biggest phone network in the US. I have saved thousands, and they only send me a text message to remind me of my billing amount or when they add a new feature - one or two a month.
Each of those cases relies upon monopolies, laws against reverse-engineering or both. In a competitive market, cell phones that allowed consumers load sounds from their personal computers as ring tones would quickly dominate.
Sorry if I broke some unwritten rule here. Link was going around twitter and I know some folks that work there.

Believed the story was something HN readers would appreciate.
Here's Daniel Markham's surefire rule to estimate projects:

Take your estimate. Double the number. Then go to the next unit.

So if you think you can do it in 2 weekends, 2x2 = 4, and the next higher unit is weeks. Sounds like a four week job.

The beauty of this is that it doesn't rest in any mathematical principles at all -- it's totally made up. Just like regular project estimating.
I actually built a HN clone in a weekend.

Of course it has a few bugs: It isn't really polished, is easy to game, vulnerable to attacks, a security hazard, doesn't work in IE6, isn't scalable, dosen't verify links properly, sometimes misses dupes, doesn't have a proper admin interface and needs some design love.

But except for that, and a few other things I can do in a weekend it's done.

:-)
Hmm...tar xzfv hhn-20090706.tgz doesn't work for you?
some really great advice at the end of the article, if people like you at work, you'll get supported when you're down and lifted up when you're up. very nice. thanks for the link.