skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where's the corresponding wake-up-call for developers who are tired of answering stupid questions about their software? I've dealt with more than one piece of software where the mailing list is filled with tons of unanswered questions from noobs because the interface or documentation is a mess. You start out asking stupid questions yourself, and everybody ignores you and keeps talking about their high-level expert problems, and you think, "What a bunch of assholes." Then after you figure out the answer yourself, the answer is so stupid and convoluted or just so depressingly retarded that you can't bring yourself to explain it to anybody else who runs into the same problem.

I wish developers would see chronic widespread noob frustration as a problem with the software that needs to be corrected by the developers. There are always a few people who are willing to spend days experimenting and digging through your code before they can use your software. Not only is it a poor piece of software that can only be used that way, it's extremely confusing, because that's not the way things are done anymore! New users are going to waste many days struggling with the overly charitable assumption that your software has a logical, well-documented interface that they are on the verge of figuring out. When they finally figure out that there is no coherent interface and the user manual should be prefaced with a directive to "tinker for a week until you understand how it's implemented, then you'll know what's missing from this manual," they're going to be filled with hatred and rage and desire to kill you. At this point, if I mentioned the piece of software I'm currently working with, it might legally constitute some kind of threat, so I'll just say that I'm pretty fed up and it's a good thing there's no dog, wife, or child at home that I might vent my rage on.
I think this disregards the fact that children in the past watched a lot of TV.
That's Hua. Rajiv was wearing green.
The ACM copyright form now explicitly says that authors can post a copy on their personal websites: http://www.acm.org/publications/copyright_form/
For those worried about running a relay and dealing with people abusing you as an exit node, here is a good article from Tor about minimizing abuse of your node: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tips-running-exit-node-mini...

One tip that you should immediately be aware of is that you don't _have_ to run an exit node. You can force your relay to act only as an intermediary, in which case you almost certainly are not going to get any calls about abuse (because you won't exist in any server logs).
The speculation was also about "casual-use 'cameras'".

Your point that theoretical limits are eventually reached is well-taken, but tiny devices could be collecting far more than the unaided eye perceives before hitting physical limits. Eventually, the devices could compete with microscopes and telescopes -- and then the "fundamental limits" you've highlighted will become a issue.
I do not know when the recession will end, but I would prefer a stronger justification before believing that professional economicists like Dr. Duy of the University of Oregon are necessarily wrong about the recession ending around 2010, and saying that we are heading for a depression is a very strong statement indeed.

Yes, the housing and employment markets are continuing to decline. This is expected. We are still in a recession, and even when it ends those are lagging indicators so they are likely to remain bad even after the recession is over. But the rate at which they decline (in other words, their second derivative) has lessened. Also, many of the leading indicators (stock market, bond market) have stabilized.

I do not understand the relavence of your statement about guns and butter, and if this is so like 1929, how so?

I do not know what will end the recession, or even if something specifically needs to end it. The economy is after all cyclic. but you made a very strong and direct statement that we are heading for a depression. Given that this is contradicted by most of the economic experts that are referenced in newspapers, do you have any stronger justification?
Spending As Percent Of GDP in United States 1900-2010
Stuck at level #13
When a startup is sinking: the road to enlightenment
Ask HN: Critique my concept
I am toying with the idea of starting a new website. After reading another post (and trying a site) today, I was struck, as I'm sure many people have been before, at how inadequate dating sites are. This led me to this idea: a site in which possible matcheswould be selected based on interest in attending a variety of events. I guess the rough idea is a "what-to-do" dating mashup, where the pool of possible daters is narrowed by interest in certain thematic events i.e. charitable stuff, jazz concertgoers, outdoorsy things etc. I did a quick google search and couldnt really come up with anything that was doing this, and thought it might be a neat idea. Comments/Refinements welcome. Also, if anyone wants to work on this, I would be happy to collaborate with someone.
Aside from Slicehost[1], has anyone found a host to be happy to let you run a Tor relay? I'm thinking of emailing the prgmr.com gentleman (who I know is around here somewhere... hi!).

[1] A couple articles about running Tor on your Slicehost slice:
http://www.tequilafish.com/2009/06/21/slicehost-setting-up-a...
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3622
You have at least two options: Sell the business to someone who wants it, or hire someone to replace you as president/manager/CEO/whatever.
Cloud and Internet backbone
I think he is like the only person I've read about, who thinks facebook advertising is great
The DoD characterizes protesters in the U.S. as low level terrorists. I wonder how the U.S. government would feel about foreign nationals helping home grown low level terrorists.
Many journals will not consider an article if it has been previously published.

Publishing to your own web page may not count but it will surely not make the journal happy, especially if you hope to get published in the same journal again.
Even PHP includes a good Mersenne Twister implementation (mt_rand() [1]) as part of the core library...

[1] http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mt-rand.php
The thing that is difficult about ads, not many people like to be told what to buy. And I think it might be the ads themselves that are lacking, not necessarily how they are delivered.

For example, look at this award winning Pringles online ad: http://awardshome.com/cannes2009/pringles/can-hands.html

The reason why this one is great, is because it isn't pushy, it has humor, and it uses normal, honest language that we can all relate to. Maybe it's these type of ads that need to be displayed in the social networks.
I'm not sure what the EFF could put in such a guide. If the police believe you are involved in child pornography and get a warrant they will at a minimum come to your house and seize all of your computers to gather evidence. I can't imagine what exactly training the EFF can give people to prevent that from happening once the police show up.

And chances are that if you're tech savvy enough to run a Tor exit node that you'd rather not loose all of your computers for the several weeks or months it might take to get them back.
Writing DSLs in Groovy
They describe that the attack depends on "minimizing the number of active S-boxes in the key-schedule" and that AES-192 is harder to attack than AES-256 because the key schedule has "better diffusion".

I'm guessing that they don't mention AES-128 because the attack simply doesn't work against the 128 bit key schedule for reasons related to the increased difficulty of attacking AES-192 with this technique.
You're leaving out the author's point that a lot of people are wondering if there is an Airbus problem in the aftermath of the Yemenia crash and Flight 447's plummet into the Atlantic Ocean. He is saying that factors other than the plane itself resulted in the crash. So I disagree with your statement that the title is misleading.
I don't want to do anything with my hands, thanks you.

Maybe reconsider robotics?
Agreed. Moreover. If your software requires a source code change because something happened in cryptography research, you've probably done something wrong.
Prime candidate for a Facebook app I should say
As far as I know, submitting to the arxiv does not qualify as publication.
Or Creative Computing.
There Really Is No Secret
Nopes, just friends. Used to work with me in a company I worked two years ago.
For the home page? Sure average people don't care about cookies, but if they get an error message when they arrive at your page they aren't going to waste time adjusting browser settings, they are just going to leave.
He's saying the title is ambiguous.

If the author is suggesting the A310's design is indeed a culprit, then the argument is weak.

If the author is reinforcing the argument that the A310's design is not likely to be a factor in the crash, then the title could be misleading.
I call it stealing because if I come and tell you a story and you publish it, without any attribution at all, then its almost stolen. Its quite gray area, but not something I would consider ethical.
"If your objects have a wide variety of attributes, either you need lots of columns with many of them empty, or you need some sort of attribute table with object-key-value triples. Both are bad relational design...

Frequently you can avoid having object that have a wide variety of attributes most of which are empty in the first place. That often indicates that the objects are not of the same type and that that table should be broken into other tables of objects that are truly alike.

That, though, is not always the case. When you truly have that situation with objects of the same kind, then I do not see why allowing the numerous empty columns (as long as they are all bound to the key and only the key) or the "object-key-valuy" tables are bad relational designs. If I am missing something, please let me know.

As for the object databases, the only one I have really heard of is db4o as another posted mentioned. I do believe that they are used in some areas of physics though. I have never used them personally, but I have heard of people using them in small scale projects just as a way to avoid the object-relational impedence mismatch complications.

To your last paragraph, I agree completely. There is room and a place for both relational and non-relational databases.
Your comment is so very incorrect.

It's not that _ads_ as a whole don't work, it's that untargeted, random banner ads are very ineffective at driving conversions.

Ads on search, which frequently tell you what to buy, and don't have room to be artsy of humorous generate billions of dollars for Google and probably much more than that for its advertisers. I wouldn't be surprised if Google gets $20-$100 CPM on its pageviews.

Award-winning ads are frequently not the most effective. The most effective ads are often bland, boring ads that tell you what to buy but take into account segmentation, positioning, targeting, behavioral trends, and so on.
If I'm reading the paper right, this is largely an attack on the AES key schedule -- so as far as this attack is concerned, AES-256 might indeed be weaker than AES-192.
Cinching sales with sports scores
:-)

I considered blogging it, and well my blog runs on gitology (http://www.amitu.com/gitology/) that I developed, required me to create a new post, git commit it, git push it, the git pull it on my webserver.

fwd2tweet.com does help you write a quick "long" tweet as easily as writing a mail to a friend.
Unexpectedly long-range effects in advanced magnetic devices | Science Blog
I've enjoyed your transparency with sales figures for your downloadable app, I hope you continue the service for this new online version.

I would like to add that some UI polishing would make this quite nice. More prominent call to action pushing the online version, too.
I don't think a downvote was warranted here, but do what you may.

Could you provide a source to your last sentence? I'd like to read more about this. Thanks.
Three Rules
Twitter Blog: May The Tweets Be With You
Does this take into account minimum wage?
Hmm, not even counting the cost of content creation, how much is it going to cost to produce 1M in ad revenue?

They mention 2.5 billion views for $1M. Being very, very conservative in data transfer, that's several terabytes a month. 4k/page is 10 TB (3.858 MB/sec sustained for a month), 32k is 80 TB (30.864 MB/sec for a month), etc. A single banner image off of gamasutra.com (not even flash) was 149k.

The netlink, server hardware, and infrastructure (bought or rented ala rackspace) isn't exactly cheap.
Watching TV Makes You Smarter
0% is pretty black and white. Many people here are in control of serious teams and I have no doubt they could duplicate SO in a weekend if they really wanted to.

Of course they wouldn't, but still, it's not impossible, which is what "0% could" implies.
Any popularity in Python over Ruby stems largely from the fact that Python came first.

I've heard Python developer's working on a Ruby on Rails application that the problem with Ruby is that approximately equivalent to Python in terms of productivity. They wanted to use Python, but pragmatically you can't make the case to management to switch from one language to the other if the other language is more or less the same. But most of the time this effect works the other way around, where Python was established before Ruby.

I was doing Perl in 1999, and looked at switching to Ruby or Python. Python was still quite small back then, but you had web frameworks (Zope, Twisted), albeit the incarnations back then are clunky by today's standards, but Python was establishing itself as a clean, readable, dynamic language. Ruby on the other hand had no web frameworks, and almost no documentation in English - the only reason I was considering it was because I was working with a Japanese localization team and they thought Ruby was quite hot.

The debate over which dynamic or scripting language to use was always between Perl and Python back then. Perl was the incumbent and Python the challenger, Ruby rarely factored into the picture. It wasn't until Rails started to become useable and gain attention in 2004 and 2005 that Ruby interest started to really blossom. And so Python was well established for many uses: scientific computing, ad-hoc data processing, network programming. If you're a development manager of an application that you want to make scriptable, you would have made the decision to already go with Python, there just isn't any compelling reason to switch to Ruby beyond the sake of switching.

Another example is IronPython versus IronRuby: work started on IronPython in 2003, work started on IronRuby in 2007. IronPython is at version 2.0, while IronRuby is at version 0.5, and this is reflected in the polish of these language implementations. A .Net developer might decide that they prefer the idiosyncracies of Ruby over Python's idiosyncracies, but if they had to start a large project in today, they'd most likely choose IronPython since there is much less risk of the project bumping up against the rough edges of IronPython versus IronRuby.
This observed pattern can be described by personality typing. I like to think of it as 2 classifications of how our brain explores - depth-based vs breadth-based search. Problem solving vs random walk. Directed vs discovered. Convergent vs divergent, etc. Essentially, one type enjoys digger deeper (defined by getting closer towards a goal) into a topic, while another enjoys expanding outward (exploring a topic, no goal required).

The majority of people enjoy doing one type of thinking and hate doing the other, which causes this culture difference. Depending on the class of problems that a field has to tackle, the community may be dominant in one or the other. Mathematics is a field in which a random walk style of exploration can yield fascinating results, while an engineering field is much more likely to benefit from a focused approach. Usually, the type of thinking that yields more results becomes dominant in the community and gets the right to snub the other.

The difference and contention, I think, arises purely out of the dislike of doing the type of thinking that you're not naturally inclined to. This dislike is rooted in unfamiliarity and a strong sense of worth that parallels our inclinations. The contention is rarely settled by arguments of logic, efficiency or practicality - it is not that people don't believe in logic, but rather because the arguments don't address the core issue. The core issue is our natural inclinations, which at its roots, are innate or at least solidly ingrained in us by the end of childhood.
> But, based on a survey of social network sites let's assume an average CPM of $0.40. You would need 2.5 Billion page views per month to earn $1M in ad revenues. That is 2,500,000,000 page views...and how many sites can sell out all their page view inventory?

This makes the mistake of assuming that one page impression = one ad impression. That's not the case on most sites. Most sites can quite easily have 2-4 ad impressions per page impression.

Also, it's not hard to sell out ad inventory at ridiculously low CPMs. There's always someone willing to pay something for a genuine ad impression. Most sites can probably sell a little bit of their inventory for a high CPM and the rest for a very low one.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the article. The article was primarily about how playing video games might affect kids' brains and didn't come to any conclusion either way that would've required knowing that kids in the past watched a lot of TV.
I really don't think the journal model works well anymore.

It used to be that distributing papers was burdensome, so they compiled them into journals and professionals paid for a subscription. Built into the cost was peer review -- they couldn't just publish ALL the articles, because there was limited space, so they had to have professional reviewers filter out all but the "best."

So now that distribution has been solved, the only value-add that a journal can claim is that filtering process, which ostensibly is costly.

It all hinges on the question of whether peer review can happen without compensation. I think it's pretty well-established now that peer review without compensation happens constantly. Welcome to the internet, right?

So the correct new model is something like a digg/HN system that aggregates articles from various fields, and allows peers to review, respond to, and upvote important papers. I think it'd need to be more complex because of voter credibility concerns, but it seems workable. I can't say the same for the current journal model.
Storing grain predates agriculture, and may have propelled it
A site can't be all things to all people.
List of Really Useful Plugins For jQuery Developers
The way I look at this story is: there are so many websites which have 'tweet' in their domains on the web.

Techcrunch may not get the story from tweetknot. But, from somewhere else maybe. So, we should not think that this story is true until someone could actually prove this.
Also, any comments or feedback would be very much appreciated!
Hard work, discipline, and luck.

Bill Gates didn't become rich just because he worked his ass off. He also had crucial connections (including his parents) that landed him contracts with IBM and others.
Hard work and discipline are necessary, but not sufficient for success.

When you get to the top, remember all the breaks you got, and consider giving some breaks to others who are where you are now.
What does it take to write the ultimate newsworthy article?

Stick the words "Hacker News" in the post title and you're well on your way.
Good point.

I didn't even think about that. ;)
I'm bookmarking this. Just for the times when I need that reminder, like now.

And, if you look at the source, you'll find this comment, too:

<!-- There really is no secret. It's worth repeating. -->
Glasshouse Virtual World Data Graphs are now updated in Real Time
I didn't say we invented hacks; I just said that Cal-Tech's been imitating ours for years. :P
Article Marketers Article Submission Service SubmitYourArticle.com Reviewed
Want to get more exposure to your articles without doing all the tedious work of submitting your articles manually? If you answered ‘YES’ then keep on reading.
Know Who's Calling: Tactile Design
Trying to make that sort of money using something like an Adsense program is going to take a hell of a lot more pageviews over having a sales force capable of selling high-dollar ad packages.

That isn't to say that sites like PlentyofFish haven't been able to do it, but your CPM has to be fairly high if you're not getting billions of pageviews a month.

Sourceforge doesn't get nearly the level of traffic that Facebook does, but they brought in $5.4 million in media revenue from 36 million uniques in their first fiscal quarter of '09[1].

1. http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=155376
Since _why is in the news today, here's an interesting post about a similar context-free graphics generator:
http://hackety.org/2008/12/04/theFrustratingMagicalAspect.ht...

(He's also a fan of Context Free, and has written about it elsewhere.)
The secret is that there is no secret? :)
Sure, luck is often involved in meteoric success. That's not to say that one must be lucky to be sufficiently successful. Set your sights a little lower than Bill's fortune.

Also, it's worth noticing that wild success is probably possible without luck, but is certainly impossible without hard work and discipline. Focus on what you can control.
It must have taken a lot of hard work and discipline to build that website.
One can't change their luck.

So at the start of an undertaking, it can only be self-defeating to acknowledge it.

Though at the failure of an undertaking, it's certainly cathartic to curse it.
and "be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down."
Yes. Not only is Oprah's Secret going to fail to increase your luck, but luck is not nearly enough.
And in the CSS (http://www.therereallyisnosecret.com/style.css):

/* There's no secret to CSS either. You just have to try and do it. */
This is a bit, well, austere is the kindest way I can put it. The bar for any sort of online profile is pretty high these days; you're up against Facebook and the subset of their userbase that filled in their 'looking for' - and they're not even really a dating site.
When he was on Mixergy, Shoemoney told me how he uses Facebook ads effectively too. But Threadless uses them differently.

- They only advertise to their fans' friends.

- They do NOT expect to make sales directly from the ads.

- They use the ads to get more fans on their Facebook page.

Their business model is based on growing their community, so this approach works well for them.
See, his assertion just worked!
This is highly dependent on what your site does. If you could somehow get that much traffic on a blog, the cost of bandwidth and servers would be very low (tens of thousands at the most, say 5% of your revenues).

On the other hand, if every page view is extremely heavy with a long tail of uncacheable content (e.g. Youtube) or computationally expensive (web search engine), then bandwidth and servers become a significant percentage of the revenues.
Hah, well done. That's one place I didn't even think looking. ;)
It's funny how the things your parents tell you when you're really little always seem to stay the same, no matter how old you get.
My first and third mentions of "browser" were stupid mistakes, I meant "search engines." I was thinking about how I had switched my browsers to use Bing as their default search engine, then daftly used the word "browser" over and over.
It's a shame that PostgreSQL still lacks meaningful XML support. That's one critical area where the commercial relational database vendors are way ahead.
I think it's pretty clear that the best way to make money from a site is to sell things. For money.Crazy, I know.