skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like it. I think simplistic interfaces are the way to go for collaborative/social apps.

The downside of course is that it's dead easy to clone these simple apps (like Twitter, TinyURL, etc.), which means the barrier to entry for your competition is quite low. This effect has been recently amplified with the boom in quality frameworks and dirt cheap infrastructure (EC2, App Engine).

The end result is that making a killer web app is not enough and you instead have to make sure you nail the social marketing of it and build up a large enough userbase that the brand/userbase becomes the real value.
I think there's a general push against domain hack URLs, some people find them confusing, somehow, apparently...
Just look at Gary Vaynerchuk, wine people are by definition the last people to adopt new technology. Yet Gary is whoring out the whole social media thing to them, for all it's worth.

Although to be fair, its hardly the early adopter case for him.
Rdrr on The Simpsons
It's healthy to be skeptical of all the news. Twitter just makes it more obvious.
Homeopathy Awareness Week
TechCrunch coverage can even be counterproductive. Especially if you are doing a product aimed for a niche most people don't know about.

It paints a target on your back, since your early success is advertised to thousands of people with the startup spirit/coding skills who are looking for the next big idea to exploit.

You can make millions selling chairs, but only as long as noone else finds out that selling chairs is a license to print money.
I was wandering the same thing - I remember their blog said "they were investigating whether or not contest rules had been followed". Which is kinda stupid, since attackers don't follow the rules, and could make more than $10,000 by NOT telling you about the vulnerability.

Anyway... I really appreciate his emphasis on never expecting things to be "bullet proof". People need to remember that more.
Even taking into account that child abuse is as bad as child abuse is, blacklisting child abuse pictures at the ISP level is unnecessary and counter-productive:

- Experiments by civil rights activists have demonstrated that it usually only takes hours to take down a child abuse website if one alerts the hosting company.

- Owners of a child abuse website (if they haven't gone peer-to-peer yet) can check by polling their own website's availability whether they're on the federal police's radar yet.

- The blacklists themselves can be considered a "best of" of child abuse picture websites; since they need to be distributed to hundreds of ISPs, their eventual leaking seems inevitable.
http://tr.im/ has become my favorite. It's the shortest one I've seen and actually has a name that makes sense.
I really hope your target audience goes for it in a big way. There are already some people that I unfollow on game day. And having a sports focused version would give them a place to go.
This is the second article I've seen on HN this morning using very similar language. If Apple skipped the Q&A to avoid negative confrontations, it certainly backfired!
Collage of 5000+ images taken from Amazon's iPhone app via mechanical turk
Electrolysis: Making Mozilla Faster and More Stable Using Multiple Processes
How does this compare to pngcrush ?
I run pngcrush with "-rem alla -reduce -brute" flags.
Perhaps the sports leagues were leaning on them. The NFL, et. al. seem to think they own the rights to any account of the games. I could easily see them thinking you are poaching on their IP (I've always thought these were absurd claims).
I stand corrected. Don't you still have to do lots of messing around (in comparison to an imperitive language) to simulate state though?
wine drinkers are older than your usual techie
I was under the impression that side effects were more common/more severe if you don't have ADHD. I stand corrected. :)
Are we still allowed to express surprise that anyone who would choose such a geeky solution has a girlfriend? Or have we all grown up?
If you read the actual filings instead of EFF's press releases, as I have, I believe you'll find the EFF's characterization to be misleading. They can be found here: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2008/responses/

Jailbreaking per se is not illegal. Violating copyright to do so is. The EFF filed for a DMCA exemption which would allow violating the DMCA for the purposes of jailbreaking, primarily of iPhones. The EFF is the one attempting to lay legal groundwork by changing the law -- what they propose is currently illegal. Apple's filing is only a response to the EFF's comments.
MySpace cutting 30% of staff in restructuring
Facebook Loses Suit Against Clone StudiVZ, Criticized For Sloppy Preparation
Oh please spare us and dont!
Is there any native English speaker to explain me why this problem/solution is funny?
actually they should be able to code all of them from scratch.
They don't have to know all the details by heart or be able to come up with the concept from nothing, but if given Wikipedia as a reference, any developer worth anything should be able to implement these basic data structures and basic algorithms without much trouble.
I think we're allowed to express surprised at the fact that the girlfriend would put up with a relatively unaesthetic solution to this problem.

Although I guess in the end they'll probably cover up the bare materials with something nice. Maybe a rug.
I don't think it's a bad idea. I suppose I did imply that with my tone. My thoughts were more inline with it being a fad and very narrowly focused more than it being bad.

It'll be critical to get kids interested in programming and if they have an iPhone and can get excited about producing apps that run on them and make their lives better, there's nothing wrong with it. It's just not quite as generic as C++ or something like that.
When it comes to sports I always say that I’d rather have exciting sports than fair sports, and I’d rather have fair sports than clean sports. I’m a fan of pro-cycling, so doping news is in my life a lot. My favorite comments on intelligence doping come from the Becker-Posner blog:

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/intellige...
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/comment_o...

I especially like Posner’s closing paragraph:

Of course the naturally gifted will object to any "artificial" enhancements that enable others to compete with them. But it is not obvious why their objections should be given weight from a public policy standpoint. It is not as if allowing such enhancements would be likely to discourage the naturally gifted from developing and using their gifts (it might have the opposite effect, by creating greater competition for them), let alone discouraging bright people from seeking out other people to marry and produce children by.
A large, complicated world state for a FP language is no simpler than a large complicated graphic of objects w/ inheritance hierarchies. You see, the inheritance hierarchies are the world state. In either system, you have to model the graph in your head to understand how it works. Complexity is the problem, not referential transparency.
It's a bit ghetto, but you could mount your home directory on the workstation via ssh from your laptop and then use it from your laptop when you need to use mercurial or whatever nifty toy.

Ubuntu puts this functionality under the 'Places' menu item.

//assuming you are even permitted to do that
That nails it right there, noodle. In large systems, the more weak points in the system, the more likely the system as a whole is to fail.
Starbucks has some of the most disgusting coffee I've ever tasted in my life, if you can call that coffee at all. I have noticed one thing that stood out amongst thais that were payed on pair with farangs, they all have mastered english more or less they can communicate with ease, you probably know that there are not that many people in thailand that have a really good grasp of english (English is not my first language also).
the final line worked out on the board, r dr r, is a homophone to the phrase "hardy har har", which is basically mock laughter, an expression to mean that something is funny. so the joke would be that the answer is funny because it sounds like laughter.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hardy%20har%2...
It's cool what Twitter has done in the search results: allowing any shortened URL to be expanded http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shortener. I await a browser plugin (or site widget) that will implement that same functionality into pages beyond search.twitter.com, maybe placing a dot next to each shortened URL for clicking.
How to update without an extremely costly remodel
Know Ways of Home Remodeling with an extreme cost effective remodel at http://www.homebuildingremodeling.com.
This is shorter: www.›.ws/ྒྷ (from http://tinyarro.ws/)
Modern take on the time tested productivity-maximizer: The sweat shop.
Very similar to ccBetty:

http://www.ccbetty.com/
RubyGems: Problems and (proposed) Solutions
Crop picking (in some cases) takes skill and attention to detail that lawn mowing mostly doesn't. Some crops, like tomatoes, are very easily damaged if the picker isn't religiously careful. I think it's more in line with the other jobs in being not worth what employers want to pay for enough Americans to satisfy demand.

Another possibility, though, is that lawn mowing has no giant corporations, and hence no industry-wide employer lobby to push for visa programs.
Apple does not support jailbroken phones. The users effected chose to install software that does not support their phones. I don't see how Apple can be considered the responsible party.
homeopathy is as much bunk as the placebo effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo

Why would anyone choose to ingest powerful pharmaceuticals if they could experience significant improvements simply by believing that homeopathy works?

Even when you take advil for a headache, some/all of the effect may just be the placebo effect.

note: placebos are used by many modern doctors who write prescriptions for a drug called "Obecalp" routinely to harness the placebo effect:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/health/27plac.html

The human mind/body healing process is too complex to dismiss placebos offhand.
"It's such an entrenched idea, but you don't get to rewrite paragraphs of books, or scenes in films, or suits in a pack of playing cards or the firmware in your alarm clock. "

It's entrenched idea because, for most of these, I do get to do those things. I'm free to rip pages out of the books I own, or write in the margin, or re-word stuff with white-out and a pen. I'm free to mix several decks of cards to make my own weird set. I would expect I can hack on my alarm clock too, except I have no idea how to alter the firmware. :) I have "re-purposed" analog mechanical clocks. And why not? I owned them.

Why should "as is" mean "stays as"?
Funniest thing is that the plot behind her head in the first picture looks like an ejaculating penis. Serendipidus timing on the capture :)
That's because businessinsider is repeating the DF story. Which makes it more than a bit blogspammy unfortunately.
Maybe not rich but there are several plugin developers that make a decent amount of revenue by selling plugins. For example check out Dan Grossman and his review plugin: http://wpreviewsite.com
I'll shoot it right back at you because I don't necessarily agree with you either (all your points could be valid) but at that point, for me, it comes down to Twitter.

All the points listed are "state changes". Protestors went from a group of 10s of thousands to allegedly 3 million, Mousavi went from being a free man to being under house arrest and the elections president went from supporting the election to allegedly calling it into question.

Now, if I hear news of a "state change" such as there my first question is "what's the source. If it's an anonymous guy on Twitter I don't jump to believe it. If it's the BBC I probably think it's possibly true.

So it still comes down to cognitive process or the lack there of represented by people who believed this stuff.

Oh, and btw, since it's a pet peeve of mine. Even if some areas are 50 across I have to believe the crowd would have spilt into narrower areas (since no venue is designed to hold 3 million people). But even at a constant 50 across you're still talking about almost 12 miles worth of people.
"IE and Safari both freak out on JPEG images that are in the CMYK colorspace. Conversion to RGB and removal of color profiles will fix this problem.
"

I've had trouble with IE and FireFox and CMYK, Safari works fine. At least on Macs, I haven't tried Safari for Windows.
I think that's how most people start. The problem becomes apparent when you don't have time to maintain and support the plugin.
Does anyone here actually USE opera?
To add to the list:
- always try to serve images at the size they are drawn
- see if background images with just solid color, can be replaced by background 'color'
Apartments in Lisbon - Lisbon Apartments: TRAVELLING TO LISBON
My input: Never update images, ever.

Apart from the fact that web browsers are notorious for over eagerly caching images no matter what http headers are specified, you have no control over external http proxies and their versions of your images.

So never allow someone to update an image, only allow delete and create actions, using a fresh new url each time.
I think that's the challenge. That is, that because WordPress isn't supporting premium plugins and the market is reaching critical mass.
If anyone has Adobe FireWorks, you can dramatically compress an image using their save facility too. That's really all I open it for.
Then it's settled. Just having read all of the comments made, I'm happy to see that there is somewhat of a consensus here- along the lines of what you yourself said: "I wouldn't even consider nootropics until you're already getting plenty of sleep, eating well, exercising regularly, and not using too much caffeine or alcohol" - I don't get a lot of sleep (haven't been getting it for the last 6 or so years, averaging in at 5-6 hours/day), my eating habits have been unhealthy since my childhood, I never exercise (I'm extremely thin despite of that), and I have been drinking British/Indian tea (with lots of sugar and milk) probably in what's considered an 'excess amount' since my earliest memory (but no alcohol, weed, or Halo :)).

I'll try my darnedest in the forthcoming semester to have better sleeping/eating/exercising habits. Thank you everyone for taking the time to reply. (I was thinking to add a few more details to my questions and replies that I think are unique in my case, i.e., I hail from a third-world country, the first time I attended school was in America at the age of 12, and I have severe social anxiety, which, very strangely, I trace back to having conflicts in living in a multi-cultural family - but I decided not to add these details, since it would make for a disheveled, disorderly discussion). Thanks again everyone. :)
Thanks! We looked at some book icons (including open books). We were afraid it might get confused with book search. Also, I liked the idea that multiple books might convey different types of encyclopedic knowledge. That is, it covers more than one subject. But if people don't get they are books, that is not good :)
I use Opera. Have been since version 4.x, and haven't ever changed. I only keep Firefox around for Firebug and Flash (nice place for Linux Flash to crash in a closeable sandbox).
I stand corrected. He knows his stuff already. I'll reread his OP.
Xerox and Kodak prove that getting an insider to fix GM is the right move
Have you looked into Laconi.ca

Seriously, though I am not sure how you jump from reporting from sports events to chit chat among users? Maybe a simple blog would do it for you?
It doesn't matter if production prices fall 50 or 80 percent: if revenues are zero, then the musician is still screwed. So you agree that musicians are getting screwed by music labels. CD sales have always been a promotional tool to get fans to go to live shows, not a revenue source for the artist (but it's a huge revenue source for the labels).

Widespread filesharing decimates potential profits because many of those that otherwise would have the album don't. That's the whole point of embracing file sharing as a method for releasing your music, so that people discover your music who otherwise would never have found it. And don't forget, the musicians don't get profits from CD sales anyway!
Hmm, I didn't have any problem with FireFox but in my case Safari was causing problems! Perhaps it was something to do with the inclusion/lack of color profiles in the JPEG?

My policy now is that any user-supplied image is stripped of all meta-data and converted to the RGB colorspace. Since I've started doing that I haven't had a single issue!
We really don't need Twitter to spread false information and have a non-trivial fraction of the population believe it wholesale: What about Obama's birth certificate? I heard he was a muslim. You know he hates the United States...etc. I think that the reaction of the author here is more of a reaction to new technology than an observation of a new phenomenon. The classic game of "telephone" is as old as humanity itself.
Very cool indeed. Is there a list of people like him that I can follow? Waking up to something this nerdy would make my day.
It'd be neat if there was a unified interface for several different "like-twitter" applications.
Using twitter's current API as a de facto interface to fulfill.
So this guy is being evaluated by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist shows him an inkblot and asks, "what does this look like to you?"

"Sex," the guy says. So the psychiatrist shows him another one. "That looks like sex too," says the guy. He shows him a third inkblot. "Yeah, that's definitely sex."

"Sir, it appears that you have a sexual fixation," says the psychiatrist.

"Well, at least I'm not the one drawing the dirty pictures."
I wish :-(

My laptop is the IT standard bastardized version of XP so I can run outlook. Though perhaps it'd be easier to crack it open, up the RAM, and run ubuntu in a VM on it..
It would also be less pythonic.
By giving them a voice, you encourage stuff like this: http://www.smh.com.au/national/parents-guilty-of-manslaughte...
Habit and conditioning beat willpower and discipline almost all the time. Drugs won't change that at their best, and at their worst they represent a shining example of it.
From the images, the space the protesters were gathered appear to be of the same scale as Times Square. I was there for New Years 1999. So were 2 million other people. The crowd stretched from 43rd Street (where the ball is) to just north of 59th Street (at the south end of Central Park). They lined two avenues (Broadway and 7th Ave). In NYC, it's 20 streets/mile, so that was 0.8 miles along two avenues...
I am still new to functional programming, but so far it seems like I produce two kinds of code. Functions that gather state and functions that modify state. Say in the above example of update_world world1 all this would do is break apart the world data structure and forward the pieces to their respective update functions and then gather the parts in to a new world. The individual update functions either do the break and gather thing or they do the actual computation on a small entity or set of entities. This makes a large number of small easy to test functions that do the actual work and several "middle layer" functions that are easy to test with stubs.

Though it would be interesting hear how people who have been doing FP for a while handle it.
I'll never understand why you have to own a mac in order to develop iPhone apps

It's not difficult to understand: the iPhone is based on a version of OS X, so when Apple came to write the developer tools, they extended the OS X developer tools. These, unsurprisingly, are OS X native.

You may not agree with it, but it's not incomprehensible.
You could say they have top men working on it right now. Top men.
There were predictive estimates.

Washington Post estimated Ahmadinejad victory by margin of 2:1 about 3 weeks before the election based on polling data.

There are also rumors sifting out of the intelligence community that the margin was expected to be about 2:1.

Obviously the rumored intelligence report I cannot verify.

The Washington Post report is elaborated on here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8101841.stm
(Just search the article text for 'Washington Post' if you are not interested in the rest.)

I'm starting to get the feeling that this was not a rigged election.
I was just using tr.im metrics today. I wanted to see what kind of other services my users might want to use, so I created a shuffled list of links to services that don't exist yet, and then observed through tr.im metrics which one got clicked the most.
Actually it was the other way round - my iPhone wielding friends complained that people kept sending them MMS messages that they had to visit a website to see!
I haven't seen a smackdown like that in a while... but that was just too easy, the OP had no clue what he was dealing with.

Had he watched the Clojure concurrency video in which Rich extensively discusses the ant colony simulation and its purpose, he might not have made that mistake:

http://blip.tv/file/812787
Cool idea. It's like you took the problem Basecamp is trying to solve and went the exact opposite way.

37signals says "We hate email! Collaborate on the web!"

Tgethr says "We love email! Just archive it better!"
I had to teach a new college grad (comp sci) working in my office what DOS was. He didn't like to fiddle with 'computer stuff'.

As I was walking him through 'CD' and 'mkdir' I almost had him type 'format c:' just to see what would happen.

So, some basics should be taught.
Wow. It's almost sickening to see the inversion of the principles of software freedom that Apple is able to get away with and not get criticized in the fanboi community.

Irrelevant. Regardless of whether I am a fanboi, my question stands.

Geeks have been lambasting Microsoft for merely having proprietary formats for 20 years.

Yes, but also irrelevant. I don't like Microsoft (or any company's) proprietary formats, but I think they should have the right to create and use them.

They even got fined for billions of dollars just for not documenting their protocols well enough.

That both annoys and pleases me, but it's not relevant.

Now Apple plays god and controls every single application that can ever even run on a platform.

Yes. It's an Apple platform. They ought to be allowed to. (What kind of attack is "stop, you're playing God" anyway? Kids "Play God" in sandpits, that's no reason to ban sand pits.)

They make developers sign NDAs that prevent them even talking about technical details of the platform publicly.

Yes, and they ought to be allowed to do this. I don't personally enjoy it or think it fosters a great community, but that's also not relevant.

They do these things that are the antithesis of everything the open software community have been trying to achieve for the last 15 years

Where and why do the open source community come into this at all? The open source community pushes its own agenda, not no agenda.

and not only do people like yourself give it a pass

I give it a pass because I see no reason not to. This doesn't mean I like it and approve of it personally, but I think it should be allowed and acceptable.

you go out of your way to stand up and defend it.

It needs defending; most of the attacks are plain silly.
Sills Insurance Agency
Do i hear RIAA knocking?