skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yeah, that's what I meant. Maybe it's just me, but sites with white text on black background tend to hurt my eyes.

I do agree that black backgrounds are nicer for watching videos though.
My father boiled this down into an aphorism I still use and share.

"You are who you hang with."

I know sometimes when I'm feeling crap I look at which groups of friends I've been spending time with lately. Always scary stuff.
I have 2 suspicions:

1 - That the users don't realize they need to subscribe and talked to "a friend" who said something like "we link to [your_site]" and that they're doing it on the sly/cheap.

2 - That the folks linking may be wanting to pass themselves off as the author of your site and that's why they're linking there. The URL provided is blocked by our office, so I can't do much checking for you.

I came across another link which I submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690600 (this has some of the bad links corrected). You may need to do some detective work on google to see if anything has been indexed yet and what that might be.

If your demo template has sales and contact information for YOU, then that might be a sufficient deterrant.
It would take a lot of voice calls to make up for charging 10p/10c for a text which costs nothing to send!
> Myers was stunned by the reaction, since he obeyed the game's rules.

Oh please. Even the article is a thinly veiled troll.

People often play after work, when they're tired and irritable. When somebody continually ruins the game and turns what was intended to be a relaxing break from life into another exercise in frustration he's going to be hated.

Online games tend to represent real societies pretty well. The older the game, the more set the norms are, and the easier it is to be break the "unwritten" rules.

Usually, when people go through something uncomfortable in the name of science they're informed beforehand, and participate in the experiment on a volunteer basis. Meyers did not have that decency -- he picked the members for his experiment against their will.
in this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686114 I promised to post this code, I've cleaned it up a little bit.

It's not the most elegant solution and I'm sure the code can be improved upon but it does the job.
and mercurial at http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/overview/
The comments are better than the original article
:-)
The over the air part of SMS can be zero cost. The SMS message is in a spare 128byte segment of a standard phone-base status message (it can send a new packet specificaly to transmit the SMS but it doesn't have to if you don't mind a few mins latency). If the receiver is on the same base station -like kids texting each other across the classroom it doesn't use any of the phone companies network bandwidth.

It takes more bandwidth to send a message back to HQ to
bill for the text message than it does to transmit the SMS.
ok, posted a link with the script: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690608

enjoy...
When free evening/weekend calls were first introduced there were stories of people using their cell phones as baby monitors - the phone co had to introduce a one hour maximum call length.
Try Stack Overflow - http://jobs.stackoverflow.com/
Would somebody please skin News.YC so that we can click on the "comments" link without having to squint and be super precise? I would like a big square to the right of the up/down arrows, and to the left of the Title/Score (spanning both, vertically).
I agree. A lot of complaints I've seen about the language, beyond its inconsistent function names and the occasional argument, are from people expecting the language to be more than it is. Different languages exist to address different problems and serve different purposes/platforms. Perhaps PHP is lagging behind Python and Ruby, but it's by no means a useless language.
On the Tufte note: for example, the pie charts are askew in some 3D angle, distorting the proportions of the slices. This looks cool but is uninformative.
The problem with LA buses is of course that when they show up has nothing to do with the timetable...
Nice! I didn't know about that; I don't know much about cellular protocols.
I've been singing like that for so long I don't even realize I'm doing it anymore.
heart disease has increased with meat consumption.
This was my thought also. No doubt it's great sales, which may indicate great customer service, but it ain't customer service.

I know I've had plenty of experience where the sales process has been fantastic, and the customer service (once the bills have been paid) quite ordinary. And it's anecdotal, but I've experienced more than one company with an automated phone system, which will send customer service enquiries to voicemail, but ring back and select 'Sales' and have your call answered in 3 rings.
I'm not saying it would be more profitable; I'm saying it wouldn't lose money, and a lot of people would prefer that service to the service they have. So in a competitive market, someone would be offering it.
I suppose so, if you consider some random people's blogs authoritative. I thought this was HN and not Reddit :)

These are blogs written by people who are promoting a high cholesterol diet -- hmm, ever notice that there is lots of money in promoting nutrition advice that confirms to what people are currently already doing?
there are many peer reviewed and exhaustive studies that show that meat consumption is related to a shorter life. check out the china study for starters.
Fansy! http://www.notacult.com/fansythefamous.htm

Seriously, what did the professor expect by griefing?
peer reviewed science being "dismantled" by some dude's blog. LOL
That form isn't for investigating failed transactions, it's for disputing a charge on your statement you don't recognize. To even know about that form you would have had to go to Help > Transaction Disputes > Unauthorized Charges.

"FPS has a thousand error states, and payments fail all the time with little to no explanation."

I am live on FPS and have seen zero failed transactions apart from those in testing I intended to see fail. By chance was your transaction amount in the form $x.7x or $x.8x? If you were in the sandbox putting a 7 or 8 in the tenths place is the documented way to guarantee a failed transaction and receive a generic error.

"Good luck with the resolution process, too."

Did you search the developer forum? If you did and couldn't resolve your issue, did you post your scenario and relevant code? The community and AWS staff are usually very helpful if you are polite and can describe your problem clearly.

As for this new PayPal API, I just read the developer doc and although it's missing a lot of information PayPal is obviously cooking up a service that may rival FPS. Regarding your point about massive complexity I agree the documentation can be a little confusing. Once we see PayPal's full version we'll be able to compare them side-by-side but one thing is for sure, neither was intended to be plug-and-play.

What I'm concerned about with Adaptive Payments/FPS/Checkout/etc is the friction point introduced by the co-branded UI. Each of these payment services requires you to send your customer away to log into PayPal/Amazon/Google and stay there for a couple of screens. As developers the big question is whether the programmatic features outweigh the conversion loss from defecting customers who feel the experience is unprofessional.
New algorithm guesses SSNs
I upvoted the submission not for the puzzle, but the author's discussion after it.
I think it was Paul Graham who said Java was an evolutionary dead end (which doesn't mean dead so much as that branch of the tree won't continue).

It seems now at least the JVM, or the best bits of it will spawn other branches.

As for the java language (which is probably what pg was referring to?) - I agree it is probably a dead end. Except in some shallow basic syntactic sense - javascript and so on (the continuation of the "curly braces") - not sure if that means anything though. In any cases, certainly the lessons learned will continue (what worked well, what didn't) into a whole lot of other languages and has been.
Thank you very much for the link! I'd just Google'd "web browser usage" and took the w3 link.
Just FYI: Please don't sign comments, http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Dear Malcolm: Why so threatened?
Even if he thought what he was doing was a good idea - it's really stupid that he was actually "stunned" by the results. I mean, duh!
BTW, the code's up at http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/overview/ now
The Productivity Map - From Followers To Producers
An argument for reconnecting with the space around us
I'm sorry, but the author is misinformed. His "points" are based on the common (mistaken) belief that Firefox isn't commercially backed. Firefox is commercially backed, just like Chrome. And he seems to think/imply Chrome isn't open source. Chrome is open source. Chrome development is very transparent too.

So this article and the points he's trying to make don't hold up.
We need to stop treating SSNs as if they are a secret. A SSN receives little more protection than a credit card number, and yet the consequences of having it stolen are far greater and much more difficult to remedy.
I already stopped. Firefox was just too slow after using Safari for a little bit. Now with Safari 4, it's even speedier, and the web development tools make a decent replacement for Firebug.
Until there's a controlled, replicable method, all these studies, approaches, genius ideas are just blah-blah-blah exercises in pretty correlations.
His point is that he got the value of "?", but not the "correct" method to arrive at that solution. Neither of blog posts seem to ask explicitly for the method.

I think choosing to take a statistical gamble on a silly meaningless puzzle (rather than attempt to solve it conventionally like everyone else) is actually not necessarily a bad idea. I talked about that a while back here : http://lhorie.blogspot.com/2009/03/games-bias-and-statistics... (albeit I was reacting to a more statistical-natured puzzle at that time)

I do agree this puzzle isn't very interesting in that it doesn't evoke as much gut feeling as, say, the Monty Hall paradox.
From Hacker to microISV: Tagging, Building and Releasing
I think scala partly achieves some of that "beauty" you describe, but it has made (or had to make) some compromises that make it perhaps less pure then the ideal (that means people can write things in the more imperative style just fine - not sure if thats a good things or not, but thats the way it is).
ACID versus BASE for database transactions
There are zero controlled studies showing this, however, and all of these studies are epidemiological/observational. It's confounded by things such as the fact that many of the groups that are vegetarian also essentially engage in calorie restriction (which has been shown in controlled animal studies to work). Meat eating, however, hasn't even been shown in animal studies to necessarily be bad, because it entirely depends on the animal (feed meat to a rabbit, bad things happen, feed grains to a cat, bad things happen). Cultures that engage in significant meat eating also tend to eat a lot of sugar, trans-fats, and other things. These studies are far from conclusive as a result.

Observational studies that are peer reviewed and exhaustive can yield results that are entirely opposite reality. Dozens of peer reviewed, exhaustive observational studies told doctors that hormone replacement therapy reduced the incidence of heart attacks. Only after 16,000 women were enrolled in a double-blind controlled trial of hormone-replacement therapy in the 90s (after 6 million women had received the therapy) did we learn that heart disease, breast cancer, stroke, and dementia actually were more common in people receiving hormone replacement therapy vs placebo. In other words, the exact opposite.

Epidemiology is only of value in formulating hypotheses, not in proving anything.
What if the signature contains information?

- Concerned American Citizen
That Firefox's market share will soon slip isn't a point, it's a prediction. His prediction has an argument behind it, but it's an argument with many assumptions; it's based on belief and prejudice.

Which is fine, as long as everyone recognizes it as such. His prediction and reasons for it may turn out to be true, but there's no way now to know if that's the case.
Someone makes an argument against checking malloc, talking about the overhead it adds.

Does anyone have a problem with using a malloc wrapper?

void *Malloc(size_t size) {
void *r = malloc(size);

if(r == NULL)
/* do things to quit the app */

return r;
}

edit: yay for " " code blocks. Hacker News++

edit again: I wasn't clear. I meant overhead in terms of lines of code it added. I'm asking if it makes sense to wrap it up in a nice upper-case call that just terminates the program if the worst happens.
Let's see:

- immutable types
- lambdas and closures
- tail recursion optimization
- first order functions

... Sounds a lot like an FPL to me!
On the other hand, as I explain above, epidemiological studies are essentially useless for anything other than formulating hypotheses (see the debacle with hormone replacement therapy).

It baffles me that anyone would entirely change their diet and lifestyle based on an epidemiological study.
BFG Python web framework 1.0 released
If I were you, I'd take this as a very strong warning sign that maybe this isn't the person you want to go into business with.

However, you may have an exit. What makes the company his company? Just having a registered company doesn't automatically give him control of the code and business. Who registered the URL (assuming you have one) who's been paying for the server? Are there any other direct connections you have to the business?

Did you get anything in writting about the terms you had agreed to?

Have you approached your friend about your concerns? Before flying off the handle, make sure that he truly is trying to change the terms. Hopefully it is all just a misunderstanding, but be aware that from here on, you'll likely have to protect yourself.
All of the publications related to the project are locate at

http://project.carrot2.org/publications.html#ieee-lingo

but I am no longer sure what the exact publication that would answer that question is
Precisely.

What he did (in game) was very simple. There's this PvP zone, Heroes come from one side, Villains come from the other side. Each side is protected by instant-kill bots/drones, like any other mmorpg, certain areas are protected by bots so enemies (PvE or PvP) don't come to close, to protect the lower level players or who just appeared.

Apparently he sat close to one of his faction's drone, targetted an enemy player, and teleported the enemy close to him, causing an instant drone kill.

Now, something like this happening once or twice is a PITA, but the article gives the impression that he did to several players, in the course of many, many weeks. It was probably very boring for him too, since drone kills usually don't give any reward.

What I find strange, the whole thing is a textbook example of griefing, and the CoH/V admins didn't do anything to stop him. Sure, it was inside the game mechanics, but a complete distortion of any intended PvP design.

Also, a little map rearrangement or some kind of "when teleported by an enemy, the player is immune to drone kills during 10 seconds" power change should have stopped this form of griefing completely.

Which makes me think, if the admins and devs didn't do anything, this whole thing was way less destructive than the professor wants us to believe. Either not much people complained, or he did stop when/if an admin asked him to.
Spider Builds Decoy Imitations to Deflect Predators
I don't see why you should feel _obligated_ to give two weeks' notice. Now, it's possible that you want to finish the project you're working on, or for some other reason you don't mind doing it. But, honestly, most of the time if you decided to quit, you're mentally checked out or even worse, hostile toward the company. And it's not as if two weeks is a long time, the employer can't get anyone to replace you that fast anyway. The company often has no obligation to give you any notice either. Now, you don't need to be flip about quitting, you can just say politely that you don't think it's working out for you, that you can't give 2 weeks notice because you need to use the time to take a break before the next gig starts, or that you won't be doing a good enough job or whatever. I think most normal people (co-workers) understand that you have to take care of yourself. That said, in my past I've given up up to six month notice, mostly because I've been lucky to work on great projects and with great people that I didn't want to undermine. But if you're not in that situation, I don't think that there are any _ethical_ considerations in quitting ASAP.
Simple Predictions are Best
> The clearest way to express certain algorithms really does involve a (local) goto.

Java doesn't have goto, but it has labeled break and continue statements. Great for exiting nested loops. Exceptions are another kind of structured goto. Of all the criticisms of Java, I've never heard the lack of goto bemoaned.

One thing I love about the Java designers is their humility: they thought the above was enough to cover all the cases where a goto was really convenient, but still made goto a reserved word. Just in case.
Whoops!

-admonished zimbabwe
Heart disease has also increased with sugar consumption. Older cultures that ate primarily meat, but not a western diet also showed almost no heart disease.
Isn't that the case with all opinion-based predictions, though?
Why a rip-off ? Isn't the incubator a very old model ?
Here's a review from Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/28/review-free-chri...
Will my video get 1 million views on YouTube?  Not a chance.
He doesn't appear to be a quant, based on his linkedin profile. Looks like he had a telecom background, so he was probably working on the architecture of their co-located trading platform. In the automated trading world, co-location means putting your machines at the exchange to reduce the latency of receiving market data and entering orders. For a high frequency strategy (i.e. tens or hundreds of thousands of trades per day), these improvements can really increase profits, and there is a huge arms race under way in industry to get the lowest latency.
No it hasn't. Heart disease in the post war era declined in the industrialized world as people could afford more meat.
People who claim that they can't afford the overhead of error checking their instructions are high. There are no realistic situation in which getting the wrong answer fast is better than the right answer one clock cycle slower, especially with the heavily pipelined architectures we have today.
Twitter to Enter the Collins English Dictionary
Checking your return values is pretty essential stuff. The error in this case was not checking that malloc could return null and then not to abort.

So, if you call malloc and do not check the return value (and abort if it is NULL) then you end up using the 'null' pointer. Normally this will cause your application to crash since a null pointer can not be dereferenced. But if the null pointer is used with an offset and that offset is under the control of the attacker then suddenly you can access pretty much all of memory. (of course, if the pointer would have been valid and you can combine it with arbitrary input you can STILL access all of memory but it is a lot harder to figure out where you are pointing, a null pointer literally contains '0' so all you have to do is figure out where you want to be, not where the pointer is pointing, you already know that).

The overhead of checking what malloc returns you is trivial compared to what malloc does internally so I wouldn't worry about that at all.
It's mostly accepted here that a print dialog pop up is better than having to click through an article divided into five pages.
AIM Embraces The Lifestream
Does something like Mixpanel do A/B testing better, or is there a hosted solution that you'd recommend? (Anything to not have to roll one's own because laziness is a virtue.)
I've been running the chrome alpha on linux for a few days and haven't had any major problems. (Although it would be nice if it could import bookmarks.)
So how could they overlook the effects of the hormone treatment if they studied so many women? Shouldn't there be some statistical observations?
I came to news.yc because I wanted to read about startups. There are very few % of articles about startups now.

(I am sticking around because of the general interest articles which is what I used to visit reddit for before it became too popular)
Ok, I read the 'article' but I'm not sure I agree with the apparent conclusion, not for the reasons given, anyway.

I'm a linux user and a web developer - and I've already abandoned Firefox for everything except FireBug - after having used every version of Firefox, on several platforms, since it was called Phoenix, I just use it as a vehicle for using Firebug (and occasionally Flash) now.

For everything else, I've switched completely to Chromium (the open source platform which is released as Google Chrome). Even though it's currently pre-beta on linux, and doesn't really support plugins yet, it's just such a vast improvement over FF, I've already completely converted.

Firefox's huge memory issues - regularly sucking up 3Gb+ after a week or two of use - constant CPU usage (even when idle) general slowness and occasional instability, make it such a pain in the ass for professional web development that Chromium coming along was a massive relief. Chromium is _much_ faster than Firefox and it's process-per-tab model is genius, making transparent the direct link between tabs and RAM; it also means that it never bogs down, no matter how many tabs & windows you've got going and closing a tab ends that process and free's that RAM, unlike Firefox.

I'm running Chromium nightlies from the Ubuntu PPA and it's coming along rapidly - they've recently made the webkit developer tools available (right click, Inspect Element), which are nearly as good a firebug, so it won't be long before I completely phase out Firefox altogether.
Correct. Also, a fair bit a the Mozilla Corporations funding comes from their search box referral kickbacks from Google, ironically.
It's impossible to create a "perfect" set of rules. So just because he lived within the rules doesn't mean anything.

Sometimes there are behaviors that are undesirable, but it's simply impossible to legislate against them.

This is true in real life as well. Politicians tend to create more and more and more complex rules, but no matter how detailed it's not possible to legislate against every bad behavior. Especially without also creating undesired side effects.
And it's excellent and rock solid too. They've started talking about a beta and marking blocking issues in the public bug tracker:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxWeeklyNotes
Well, if you want to avoid the call overhead do it with an 'inline', that way there is no overhead at all.
Oh, come on.. This article is on the company's website..
Yeah, the idea that he was stunned either makes him the most socially inept person on the planet, or a complete troll of a person.

It's also perfectly within the rules to throw the basketball out of bounds every time you get ahold of it, but if you did so, no one would want to play with you. Would Myers likewise be stunned by this revelation?
Back to the paypal/ebay vs Amazon, I think you're right. These are both really online commerce enablers.

I would place my bets on Amazon coming through on top. They have a stronger history of innovating & consistent improvement over time.

Paypal & Ebay have this aura of scaling down to the 'I'll sell you my hat' level. They do. But I wonder how much of Ebay's (or paypal's) bottom line comes from the not-a-business crowd vs from actual businesses.