skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Audio slideshow: From mainframes to personal computers
They also reduced the size of their logo next to the search box.
3 non technical tips to be a better software developer
I hope so, at least for a few days, because the hard drive on my MacBook just went sour.
an android might...
Michael Jackson is the First to Sell 1 Million Downloads in a Week
Quite true. My brother is an audio technician, he does recordings for bands as well as the technical work in setting up studio's and such. He knows almost nothing of programming and little of theoretical mathematics (outside that which he uses) yet when I talk with him about anything technical, I keep noticing he has the programmer/engineer/hacker/geek mind. People with a passion for anything technical tend to intuit concepts like abstraction and logic, even without being taught explicitly.
I have no idea. If they don't change it soon I'm moving over to bing for keeps.
I've been asking the same questions lately and trying to find the answers. The problem that I've run into is that a lot of designers just feel what is right. It seems very instinctive, which makes it hard for them to pass on knowledge.

One designer that I found who seems to know and actively apply principles of good design is cameron moll (http://cameronmoll.com). Cameron gave a great talk a while back at the HOW Conference, and he posted a pdf to accompany the talk http://cameronmoll.com/archives/2009/05/free_download_good_v.... I think this document is a great starting point to learn about design. Obviously, a 10-page document doesn't cover everything possible, but it recommends a few books for learning more. I haven't been able to pick them up yet, but I suspect you will find them helpful.

1. How Designers Think by Bryan Lawson
2. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
3.Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
4. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Consultant spam.

Apparently a "Web 2.0 Page" is also known as a "blog".
Chinese security company shares huge malware database
According to the documentation, you can't index on XML directly because there are no XML comparison operators (I suspect this is to avoid hair-pulling debates over whether `<foo x='y'>` should compare equal to `<foo x="y"></foo>`). But you can serialize the XML, or a fragment of XML retrieved by XPath, and cast it to text, and you can build an index on the result of that serialization. (PostgreSQL has supported indexing on expressions for a loong time.)

I think the place you lose is if you have some arbitrary XPath expression for which you haven't constructed a DB index yet, and you want to search on that expression.
If not technical in terms of CPU cycles, technical in terms of design. For one, I don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom of Stack Overflow to see the answers to a question. Stack Overflow also loads far faster, and has unobtrusive ads. These are things that hackers understand are important, and the suits have a difficult time understanding.
Creative new way to fund a movie
so if he could sell something for $5 and get one in 100,000 of the visitors to buy then he'd meet the ad sales ... freemium anyone?
Campaign urges BBC News to release full text RSS feeds
Stopped Reading here:

Employees, he says, need to believe that serving meals and cleaning tables and cooking pasta in a hot kitchen is meaningful. "It's very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff," Pickens says. "We put the two together."

I've had 4 different friends who have worked at various Olive Gardens (3 for longer than 2-3 years). All of them hated it.
That's silly. Programmers are being brow-beaten into radically changing their programming style to accommodate a drastic 90-degree turn in the evolution of hardware, from general-purpose serial to parallel and SIMD. Look at this rasterizer, for instance. It's comically inefficient on most hardware of the last decade. If this keeps up, optimal serial algorithms are going to become just academic ideals like Turing machines, never to be implemented.

You could say there's a back-and-forth between hardware and software, but to me it looks like software is playing catchup. "Oh I've got 16-wide vectors now? Ok let me go back and completely change everything." "What, I can't load a vector from an odd-numbered array position? Hmm, there goes THAT algorithm." The electrical engineers are running us.
Not related to the point of the article, but don't most people want to go to bars when they are crowded? I do anyway.
He also appears to confuse a group of 15-20 men on a boat for a society.
No, it is a Swiss army knife. I love my first generation iPhone - it allows me to occupy myself for a finite, battery and/or attention-bounded amount of time when stuck in line, on the train, bored at a work event. But sometimes you need a real chef's knife for real tasks. Like coding
Since we don't have access to our data, and since it took them a very long time to do this, I'd guess that the reasons are more subtle than we could practically guess. It probably increases their profitability per page by some tiny fraction, which is big money with their volume.
I have entirely switched to my laptop, but when I'm at home, I hook it up to my larger monitor and keyboard. My prediction is that mobile devices will actually fill this niche, allowing you to consolidate to one computer, but effectively hook up to a more comfortable setup at home.

Desktops will still exist, if only because they will provide the latest and greatest technology, but for people who don't need the horsepower, a mobile device should work just fine. Laptops almost strike me as the worst of both worlds: crippled hardware due to form factor, but still too big to comfortably carry for most of the day.
You can't even check that, because a significant part of SO's functionality could be hidden from you.
I second that. I've had bing on my work computer for the last several weeks, and google at home. I haven't missed google on my work computer. And I think the UI for bing is pretty slick; you hover over a link and see a preview.

A couple of times, I didn't find something in bing, switched back to google.... and couldn't find it either. So I guess you could say that, provisionally, I'm sold.
You can't tell me you've never been to an obscure/old open source project's website with broken download links before...
oh, this is a paid position. I assumed that was a given.

and you're being rather dramatic. We're not requesting a monster coder: "junior" developers are bloody useful to startups.

We thought it was a pretty great position to a summer student who wanted to work on an interesting project.
Not when they're too crowded, as Yogi Berra famously pointed out.
One huge improvement is the prominent download link on the homepage of every project, linked directly to an installer for your operating system (or the nearest thing the project offers to that).

That was the single worst usability problem with SourceForge in the past, the need to dig thru 5 levels of download screens, navigate a collapsable tree and find a little link just to download and install the software.

Less emphasis on programmers contributing source code. More emphasis on lay users looking for useful software. I'd call this a step in the right direction.
Did you mean http://www.webcreme.com/ ?
Sorry, yes. Typo. My bad.
Doesn't CakePHP have "production mode"?

Yes, its a matter of changing the debug value to 0 instead of 1 in /app/config/core.php. If this were set you'd be getting 404's instead of error messages.

@OP - This probably isn't the best place to sell your site, but you're going to need a lot more stats if you want to sell it anywhere. At the very least you need to show proof of revenue over time. A good place to start your asking price is 8 * monthly_profit.
Expected utility is probably a more appropriate gauge for these decisions, rather than expected value
Except that they don't tend to be young:

http://gigaom.com/2009/06/18/the-young-entrepreneur-stereoty...
The perils of estimation
Follower count is the only mechanism that Twitter provides for determining worth -- misguided or not. With some sort of tweet-ranking (everyone's doing it these days), perhaps there would be a better way to determine "prominence".
-m
I am struck at #14
Live Strong - Tour de France Chalk Bot
Not entirely on topic here, but what with the Tour starting on Saturday... And it is a cool machine!
what the freck happened to using cmd/ctrl + arrows to organize the tabs?? i usually have dozens of tabs opened and i used that feature to prioritize them! now they took it away and it's frecking annoying
Marvel At the Ingenuity of the Chinese iPhoney
Tell HN:  A method for finding links to submit to Hacker News.
Instead of just submitting what you find on reddit or other social news sites, why not also try this approach:

* come up with an idea that you have not seen before

* google it to find links on that idea or something related

* submit what you find to Hacker News

The advantage of this technique is that you would be able to find links that are not presently hot on other social news sites.
I got the impression that ads in specialty publications and trade magazines only have low production values because the companies advertising have small budgets.
The interesting thing about the article is that the NoSQL movement has succeeded in reaching outside the database nerd circles! To get some insight in the actual trade-offs and uses cases for non-RDBMS database systems, this article is a much better read: http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/should-you-go-beyond-relational-...
This is kind of ironic, if you consider that digital distribution can empower the artist to sell without a whole bunch of intermediaries and therefore benefit more from the sales...
I've only had my iPhone since the 3GS launched (so barely two full weeks) but I've already stopped taking my laptop with me when I work out of town.

I used to lug my laptop around as more of a precautionary measure and not out of necessity. But with decent SSH, FTP and other "sys admin" apps available for the iPhone my laptop is now collecting dust in a closet.
Alternatively, leave this open throughout the day to see how much money you could've earned, but didn't because you're reading the internet.
"it's a little less theft-proof than a real one, but it comes close."

Understatement :)
Living with First-Person Shooter Disease
Apple are the big winners.
New Hair Technology
Welcome to Hair Technology an Aveda concept salon! It offer services of complimentary additions, including a head, neck and shoulder massage
Until I can hook my iphone up to some sort of pocket projector, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, I'll be lugging (ha, it's only 4lbs) my laptop around with me.
That sounds like a Viz top tip - "HACKERS: save money on torches by waving your expensive, brightly-lit mobile around in front of you while walking down the road in the dead of night."
The problem is not how many different ways a rumor can be written, it's how many rumors can be written. Esp. considering the fact that you have websites which automate the process of rumor-manufacturing...
Nokia N97 Theme : Cut Out
here's the direct url: http://bbcfree.net
First, the few rich guys that I know (north of $10m) are shitheads. Not that they are personally offensive, or even necessarily morally bankrupt. Instead they are willing to ask for asinine things from people who should rightly be offended by the request. They try to make deals that favor them without regard to the interests of the other person, and it turns out to be a winning strategy because they'll get rejected over and over, but in the 10 or 20% of cases where they win, they get ridiculously good deals.

That tendency to ask for too much could be seen as a type of over confidence, but it's also a riskier strategy on average.

Then, these people are almost indifferent to the details of whatever deal they've made. They will make a deal that is exactly what it needs to be to get signed, but which is utterly impossible to deliver. They don't care: "it'll work out."

That's another form of over confidence: the belief that impossible things will work out well enough. It also turns out to be true enough to get someone into the multimillionaire range. One has to be a little more careful to break much higher than that, but it's a good starting strategy. And again, it's a risk to make a deal you might not be able to deliver on.

I didn't read the paper, but I know that dissertations necessarily have to be very limited, so they tend to be simplistic when they are original research, so I wonder:

1) Who was in the entrepreneur group? Successful serial entrepreneurs, or just some undergrad kids in the entrepreneur club?

2) How risk measured? A little psychological battery designed to measure general risk-taking won't capture the mindset of a person who does shaky deals. Is it risky to do try for a deal that'll probably fall through and you probably can't deliver on, or is it safer to do lots of quick and dirty deals so the volume makes up for the instability? How could this paper have measured that?

If anyone has access to this database, let us know the answers:
http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/52/9/...
Yeah, but if everyone follows that advice then we're back to square one
1. Despite the name, it's not just for news.

2. Some people weren't here a year ago and haven't seen it before.

3. There are 50-100 items per day on the front page - it won't kill you to see a few repeats a week.
For the past few months I’ve been having trouble with my laptop, so I’ve had to fall back on my first-gen iPhone as my main computer.

While it’s capable of quite a lot, it is not a substitute for a real computer and I don’t think anything in its form factor ever could be—primarily due to the small screen inherent to mobile phones. The iPhone’s way of zooming in on text blocks is certainly helpful, and better than the ‘dumbphone‘ method of showing a few dozen characters per screen, but it’s a less than ideal way to read anything of length.

Let’s get to work on those holographic displays.
I ordered three very good (2nd row side stage) tickets for the final show scheduled. I have one of mine scheduled to start on ebay later today with a minimum bid of $150. If I get a bid, I'll list the rest of my tickets. I believe I have at least 30 days to decide and don't see how a strategy can be more optimal than preselling the tickets.

You can see a picture of the tickets here: http://www.michaeljacksonlive.com/images/tickets.jpg. They are printed with a 3d lenticular process.
Criteria linked
The hardware keyboard on the G1 goes some way toward this from where iPhones are, but it's still not really useful for typing on (actually, I got a G1 last year after trying to type on an EEE and finding that my fingers and/or hands were too big to do that, so I might as well get a phone in the same device).

There are a bunch of "ultra mobile pc" devices like the OQO that are probably a better fit, especially since some of them have 3G/EDGE, and you can use Skype to replace your cellphone with them.
http://www.phonesuit.com/products/MiLi_Pro_iPhone_iPod_Video...

At least the projector is in the works.
I love the idea but I'm a little worried about how they keep calling it an investment. I don't know the details but the phrase "accredited investor" and the issues Prosper had come to mind. I sure hope they don't get into trouble for using the word "investment" without discussing the return.

EDIT: Oh, there's a spreadsheet at the bottom with potential return information.
Standing desk for coding
I find that working at a standing desk is the most ergonomic way to code.

Previously i have bought tables, but recently i got inspired by the Door Desk, and decided to build my own.

This is the result.

In the end building a desk was easier and cheaper than I thought!
The irony is that Michael Jackson is the ideal artist for digital distribution. EVERYONE likes at least one Michael Jackson song. Or at least everyone I’ve ever met. So though his prime was well before the iTunes era his broad appeal shows how digital distribution can help an artist sell more music by giving the consumer the ability to pick and choose what songs they want.
That's your laptop. ;)

For example, an x200 or x200s can comfortably give you computing power with a decent dualcore processor while weighing under 3 lbs. Obviously, you can't carry it in your pocket, but it's just about as portable as a frisbee. "Too big to carry around for most of the day" no longer applies with a laptop like that.
> It happens with large RDBMS systems anyways after about 5GB of data, same type of scalability decisions have to be made.

I work every day with a > 4TB database and its all on 1 machine (a very big machine) with some very fast SAN. If you have money, Oracle can get very big on the right hardware. I am willing to bet MySQL or Postgres could do very well on that sort of hardware too.
Email sent per weekday, month, hour - with python
I'm a huge fan of The Morning News and Arts & Letters Daily
This would be pretty useful. The best use of the BBC's RSS feeds that I've seen was on a ferry and they had BBC screens showing the latest news.
>>Object oriented models are fine if you write one application. But they tie functionality to data very closely and that makes repurposing of data for seperate applications much more difficult.<<

I've taken a different tack in my research--create a generalized user object and then build applicatin objects on top of them, with the base user object responsible for all persistent data. (These objects can each be mapped into an XML document, so there's a fair amount of flexibility).

The work has gone very slow, but here's the site: http://agilewiki.ning.com/ and mind, I have mixed in some hype/BS, though mostly it is intentional things which I've previously prototyped (been working on this over 6 years now).
Yeah, if they make the keyboard and screen as big as my laptop's keyboard and screen. I can't see doing any type of serious development on an iPhone.
Sex, censorship, and the Web
Those Elvis tickets would have gone for more right after Elvis's death if eBay had been around. To properly compare, you would need to find out what Elvis tickets went for in the month after his death.
Just out of curiosity, what's your favorite technique for generating random numbers from nature? Let's say 7 numbers between 0 and 99.
One database I work on was under 2Tb when I got it a little over 3 years ago and is nearly 30Tb now, so I am very familiar with the scaling issues. No need for sharding or any of that nonsense either!
The problem is, interviews cost money. We fly every candidate in for a day of interviews and put them up in a nice Manhattan hotel. And that's the cheap part. The expensive part is taking developers' time to actually do the interview.

So while the interview most certainly looks at those sorts of things, we try to interview only when we're confident that a candidate has the potential to actually get the job.
Spotify releases first audio book (uk only)
This story taking place 1993-1994, Apple would have actually been without its charismatic leader.
Should you upgrade to Firefox 3.5 ?
You're limiting yourself. Selling things doesn't mean having a crappy web store with mugs in it. For facebook it means figuring out how to package and sell its massive database of golden marketing data. For Homestarrunner it's a matter of figuring out how to bring people into their in-group by uniting them with recognizable paraphernalia.

For you it might be something else, but it's almost certainly not mugs. Your comment boggles my mind:

> But that is a way for a business to make money, not a site.

If you are trying to make money with a website, that's called a business. Otherwise it's a hobby, which is fine too.
I'm pretty sure the post was asking that question, not answering it, the goal being to find out how many people say yes and their reasons why.

Boiling it down to "10 reasons you can use an iphone instead of a laptop" would be stupid. But asking people what their 10 reasons are? I don't think so.

As to the point, I think the trend is interesting. As smart phones become more powerful/ubiquitous, less people will take laptops on short trips. Then more apps become optimized for phones, meaning there's less reason to take a laptop, meaning more phones, meaning more apps. I've found the iphone version of some websites easier to use and navigate than the desktop version.
Don't do it! Your Linux was free and nice before. Now it's closed-source Adobe's slave.
Well if you're interested in fleshing it out, I might be able to provide some help with the natural language parsing.
Twitter followers 'can be bought'
Brilliant, I can't wait to use this (or rather... I can).
this seems to work best when you're not really searching for anything in specific. I searched for a band and it was fun just browsing the results, something I wouldn't normally do in google.
Indian court legalizes gay sex
Well, equivalent in there is a direct transformation from one to the other, but in the sense of a programmer's approach, not really equivalent.

Yes, REs are transformed to FSM, but the problem-solving approach provided by skills in writing FSM is different, and according to the article, often better.
Listening to a song on repeat all day drives my wife nuts. It's just how I roll. Roll on, Matt.
Put it up on eBay.

Actually, let's just start bidding right now. I'll put up $50. Anyone for $55?
Best Online To-Do Lists
Sorry, by "too big to carry around for most of the day", I basically meant in my pocket. My laptop is fine for carrying around if I know I will want my laptop, but my phone comes with me regardless. I can't imagine taking a laptop to a party or out to dinner, but I do this all the time with my phone. As such, I interact with it in a totally different way, and it allows me a huge amount of freedom.

There are certainly a lot of computers out there that are no hassle to carry for most of the day, but it's still a conscious choice. It seems to me that the final barrier is the decision to carry it everywhere, not just anywhere.
Still waiting for them to release music from The Beatles!
Well thought out gutters can make a big difference to the readability of a page, but that generally is only a big factor when it comes to pages with lots of data crammed into multiple columns; not something you’d assume would be a problem on a Google results page. My best guess is that (like the aforementioned shades-of-blue incident) they did a whole bunch of user testing that suggested that the usability and probably profitability of the page went up by a couple of percent with that precise amount of extra margin.
Also, compiler design classes are not obscure. Mine helped me land a job... working on a compiler.

Additionally, I find state machines in many business domains. Everything that some kind of "ticket" object (be it customer support or defect tracking) will (or should!) have state machines, with rules of varying complexity, to escalate the status of these tickets.
This is no big shock given that, at its core, Twitter is all about self-aggrandizement.
-m
Yeah, but that's about relations between the pirates and the states whose ships they pillaged. I'm wondering about the relations with the states whose ships weren't pillaged (as much).
Given that the tax payers (and I'm one of them!) fund the BBC, we shouldn't be needing to demand this from them. They should've done it ages ago without prompting. It's our money that paid for it and we should have unfettered access.

Come on Beebs, release your feeds!

I'm seeing a parallel to government funded academic research that comes with stipulations that the resulting publications should be Open Access.
that was kind of my point, but I didn't want to sound too aggressive by saying that

yet ;)
Do you own freescreencasts.com as well? I notice it was registered not long after, has the same private registration vendor, and has the same nameservers. Could be coincidence but if you have that domain too it makes it somewhat more valuable.