skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty nifty for just two days of work. If it's something you'd like to pursue then the obvious choice is to incorporate your own Amazon Associate codes into the links and thus earn income from the book sellers (be up front about doing this.) Also you can offer a cheap paid account where you allow the users to do this themselves.

For the widget, it looked somewhat easy to theme, but you may incorporate theming options into the interface as well. Color the links. Center items, etc.
It's not that bad; a little math suggests people would still use more water for flushing the toilet than transportation over the average day.

Energy density of 1 kilogram of hydrogen = ~1 US gallon of gas. A gallon of water has ~2/(2+16) * 3.8kg =0.4 kg.

So ~2.4 gallons of water + (ton of energy) ~= 1 gallon of gas.

PS: Bulk fresh water still tends to run at thousandths of a cent per gallon in most areas. But, 14 kilowatt hours desalinates 1000 gallons of seawater so 14 watts per gallon which is a tiny fraction of the energy needed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
HN has a good combination of content selection and comments. I've honestly never seen such high quality commenting on articles. I generally find about half of the links on the front-page interesting, and the comments are always lucid. If the link is garbage, somebody always points out the errors in the link in an intelligent way, not an annoying way (like /.).
I think something that's more important to me than HN being an intelligent community, is that it's a respectful community. People have polite (and intelligent) discussions (about topics that interest me) - that's become rare on the Internet.
"simply take all of those members and combine them into one super-site, Ning.com"

I have to say if that was a planned scam, it is quite funny to plan on "let's find millions of members". If you can find millions of members, you don't need to scam.
I would think the opposite. With large companies there's a track record and probably enough visibility that the investor knows of their existence and could approach the company directly. Look at the way Fred Wilson works. It seems like he often starts by trying out the product before he knows the team(although he may spot them through his own web of connections).

With smaller investments, there's so many, it seems clear that there needs to be a filter to what you see. From the outside, it might seem like you need to be on the in-crowd in order to get a referral, but there are actually plenty of ways to work your way up to that referral by impressing people on the periphery.

One of my friends just took (or maybe is just about to take) money from Marc and he started out as an unconnected founder. But he worked is way into the meeting by impressing a series of people. The process, though, took two years, went through at least three levels of filters. So start by impressing the people around you. If you really are impressive, they'll introduce you to more people.

However, if you have an idea, nobody will vouch for you, and you need money now, then you're probably not going to get money even if you could get a meeting with Marc.
I think there is some benchmark that a country doesn't become a democracy if it has a certain percentage of export income from natural resources.

Norway was a democracy before the oil income. (I don't know about export incomes and Canada/Australia. Do they get most income from that?)

Edit: Syntax, so it will parse in your brain.
Blood Glucose Monitors
So I'm not fat - I'm big muscled?
On Hearing and Speaking the Truth
This post was created around the same time as all of the Bernie Madoff "everybody and everything is a pyramid scam!" insanity going through the news for awhile.

If I remember correctly, pretty much any story with "pyramid scheme" or "ponzi scheme" in the title got massive amount of linkage.
Haml & Sass 2.2 Released
Interesting route. I made essentially the same trip but stopped off at reddit for a month or so between Digg and HN.
well said, exactly the same experience here. I looked all over that first page for an idea of what it did before clicking on "About." In general, leaving a page to figure out what it does is simply not what I expect to do anymore.
Web usability guidelines
Hmmm: 28 up-mods at this point, but no comments. I'm novice at JS, and wondering if the author (Lengstorf)'s take on JSON usage agrees with the more experienced developers here.

In particular: any expansion on his minimal discussion about security issues? Thanks in advance.
Over a year in the making, this is a huge release for haml & sass. Both have new websites: http://haml-lang.com and http://sass-lang.com
I'm of the opinion that 99% of web startups that are ad based are doomed to fail. There's nothing here that could be packaged into a freemium/subscription model, so forget about that. Perhaps merchandising could work out (get your successes on a T-shirt), but I wouldn't count on it.

As a fun weekend project, I'd say it was a success. Plus, if it works for you and you like it, that's awesome. It's a stretch to call it a startup.
Still, if the proportion of people with high BMI changes, it has to mean something. I don't think the number is quite as useless as the article makes it out to be. But of course for individuals one might have to look at more parameters. It is just a rough guideline.
I really didn't understand the pyramid scam part of this article, but many of the other points that it makes are totally true. My company got bit when they disabled access to the php source code without warning back in the fall. We had customized a Ning site fairly heavily.

Also they used to have a REST api to access the data that was stored in their "Ning Content Store". I'm not sure when they disabled access to that but before they did it was barely usable anyway. It was full of undocumented bugs that would cause your operations to fail.
Exact same experience for me. Just-launched sites should have a quick, easy-to-read "what do we do" blurb or graphic.
thnks guys. thats great feedback. I definitely need to add a bit of explanation on the front page.
The one essential truth of computer security
I wouldn't expect hacker news articles to be restriced to technology or startups or even news. I would expect them to be aimed at a deeper understanding of a topic.
Which is a space-filling problem, mentioned above as how nature uses hierarchy.
Agreed, I had to stop reading when the drawing of the pyramid scheme came up, as its complete speculation based on a move Ning made to email all users of the site, even those who are members of paid sites (who pay specifically to avoid adverts). That move is newsworthy in itself but this is highly speculative and sensationalized.
Synchronizing AJAX: Event Pooling with jQuery
I also echo this comment. Just one line would do it, with a link to the about page for more information.
It's both - basing policy on a bogus metric will almost inevitably lead to problems.
The same can be said for comments that conflate ruby with rails.
>at that time earning $400,000 annually

I really, really need to leave the Midwest. He was basically a dev lead?
I wrote an extension similar to this at http://gregstoll.dyndns.org/~gregstoll/passwordhash/ but for some reason I'm hesitant about changing over to this scheme.
Here's what's not clear to me... Was the code simply a low-latency platform for making arbitrary automated trading decisions, or did it include trading strategies as well? hachiya's link suggests that the major value was the microsecond latency of the platform. If that's the secret sauce, I would think it could be replicated without resorting to espionage.
could you elaborate here? what are the perceived band/quality issues you mean?
The article makes the implicit claim that IKEA does a favor to Russians by selling them stuff and not Russians do by buying the stuff. I'm not saying the opposite just that this is not as obvious as the article makes it sound. It says that they invested x billions of dollars. Obviously they are planning to make a profit, so on the net money will leave the country due to their presence. If I understand correctly they want to open retail stores not manufacturing plants. Did I miss some finer point ?
The company that I work in starts giving you responsibilities from the next level without a promotion and you only get promoted if you have completed 1 year of performing the next level responsibilities _well_.
There is an decent comment speculating on why/how as well
http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-case-of-quant-tradi...
I don't believe you can operate a large business in Russia and not pay bribes. To think otherwise is naive.

Although my experience is 5 years old, I don't think things have changed so much that Ikea isn't paying bribes.
Enthusiasm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubWq-27184U
Why bother with macports? I installed XCode and just download the source and do the ./configure;make;sudo make install dance.
erlang. because somehow my install of ejabberd failed and I don't know the first thing about how to troubleshoot it. plus I want to learn more about languages that are good with parallelization.
I actually like it quite a lot! To be honest I like the simplicity, and the fact it works and does what you'd expect it to.

Plus you have the ability to do so much with it, like extending it to incorporate your own amazon ref, making it do stuff when you click a book (like display a larger image and the book blurb), or even integrating it with other book services.
Odds are, I will never do a software-only startup. I'm an embedded systems guy and at the least I'll have to release electronic hardware as well. But for me HN is business from a different perspective. I get to see things from a primarily web-app, data-driven perspective. And while a lot of the business models I see here are doomed to failure, I can still learn from them by seeing what people are attempting to do.

Science, math, languages? Not so much. Tech business is a lot more interesting and fun.
A "quant" is a trader who writes his own trading software. It's easier for them to do this than to write a spec for someone else, especially since it's constantly being tweaked and tuned, and the full-time programmers in a bank build tools and infrastructure, they don't trade themselves.
API Design vs. API Usability
Take this job and shove it
Make one that just filters out celebrity news and other "Not HN" articles.
I think it's more a matter of the author didn't include any commentary at all.
I don't think it would have any noticeable consequences for anyone except IKEA itself.
Wow. A wrapper class for MD5 and SHA functions? A non-standard library for a standard library? That's it?

I realize this is Objective-C and hence it even works on the iPhone which gives it some sort of pseudo-cool alibi and blah blah, but are we seriously having this kind of über-basic stuff on the HN frontpage?
Congratulations to the author, Hampton Catlin, and he has many appreciative users who are excited about these releases. Sass makes CSS so much better.
How did they "fight" exactly?
It seems like all social sites eventually have insurrections like this, certainly Facebook has this all the time. Do people think this is just part of the cost of doing business, or is there a better way to deal with user complaints?
An Apple representative has reached out to Xiph and their lawyers (SFLC) to make another attempt to address the (overblown, imho) submarine patent issue to the satisfaction of Apple's lawyers and so add support for Theora and Vorbis. So the story isn't over for Theora as the HTML5 video standard yet.

http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-July/002415.html

It's worth pointing out that no-one has suggested H.264 as a recommended codec, not even Apple or Google who are both shipping H.264 support. Since it is patent encumbered it simply doesn't pass the first test for getting into a W3C standard. You'd be as well to suggest Flash or Silverlight be added to the spec, it would get shot down just as quick.

Apple apparently tried to get one of the less advanced H.264 profiles made royalty free, so it could go into the standard, but was getting pushback from some of the other patent holders in the MPEG-LA. That would have been interesting as it would have been a "first hit is free" kind of deal, where Safari/Quicktime would be able to support the higher levels of H.264 but Mozilla/Chromium/Linux wouldn't and Opera presumably would refuse to do so on principle.
Ask HN: Does the iPhone still need Flash support?
Does the iPhone still need Flash support?
It spells disaster, for sure. But basing a rigid policy with no regard for circumstances on a decidedly non-bogus metric like body weight will lead to similar problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranial_cavity

Glad we've finally cleared up the function of that space filling matter.

Aristotle asserted that the brain's function was to cool the blood. Later, it was asserted that it was responsible for cognitive facilities. And now, finally, we realize that its job is to fill the space in between one's ear ...
Maybe they want normal, civilized treatment. However, they do some serious bashing in process of acquiring that, so I did some bashing too.
And! I didn't want anything besides normal, civilized treatment, too!
Makes it an interesting social experiment.
Not so fast mister. At my job, IE7 remains a mere glimmer on the horizon. Meanwhile 15k users suffer in silence.
If you can have a huge successful business without paying any bribes, that sounds like a pretty managed level of corruption.
That's disappointing!
Does this mean we can finally use Compass without all the Haml gem dependency problems (or the edge-gem which has been recently employed)?
It's a really nice project. Overall I found it quite easy to use, but I think you could improve the distinction between creating new BookBoxs and updating BookBoxs.

Perhaps only showing one of the password options based on where you came from or what your last action was would be a good start.

As everyone else said, there is loads of scope for expansion which is great.
10 Worst Co-founder Types For Your Startup
They haven't tried snarky yet, but Google does invite users to upgrade from IE6, and they suggest IE7: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78160...
I came here from the link on pg's site, repeatedly. For a long time I just lurked. I started posting comments (for which I had to register) after I started noticing comment threads on which I had something to say. I like the start-up culture here, the most. What I also like is the general intellectual curiosity.
why? I notice you've received (18) upvotes, which in this case probable means agreement, so there's obviously some support for not having this feature.

Is it specifically subreddits to avoid? I completely agree that subreddits are a terrible implementation of user-content customization because they force items into a single-parent hierarchy.

However, categories that filter content according to different weights would be quite useful. By pre-selecting these categories and thus pre-computing them, it would even be reasonable to implement (actual per-user filters might not work so well in real-time).
IBM Milepost Compiler - Machine Learning for Embedded Programs Optimisation
That means I don't have the citations at hand, but I recall reading that gifted students in general gain knowledge (as shown by curriculum-based achievement tests) during the summer, regardless of whether they are in programmed activities or reading on their own.
Lessons Learned In The Downturn
huh? i was unable to parse anything after "grrr damn web designers."
Amazon Ordered To Pay Back $119mm In Taxes. More Tax Trouble May Be Ahead.
Well, I don't know about Canada but in AU there's a mining lease fee, then corporate and income tax, then ownership restrictions (majority local ownership of shares). The government certainly gets its pound of flesh, in fact we're running our first deficit in 15 years mainly because commodity income is down, heh.

But yeah, good point on being a democracy before the money started to flow. That might indeed be the key. Resource income enables an otherwise uncompetitive, poorly-run country to keep its head above water, and sustain the worst sort of government even in the absence of advanced industry. And Russia is certainly pumping its oil as fast as it possibly can.

Who knows though. A bit of oil money would probably help North Korea. At least they'd have something to trade, some link to the outside world, some foreign currency to buy food. That's what I don't like about nice neat theories like that - they try to simplify the inherently unsimplifiable ..
A Social Contract for Agile Development
both are smart. i definitely agree that this is the first search visualization that looked like more than eye candy. i mean, it is fun to use, but it also seems to be useful.

i love the tabs, too. news v web v images etc.
Sass makes managing css a breeze. Congrats to all involved
I wonder what benefits does Ning provide? Surely by now there should be open source projects covering the same set of functionalities? I think you can not even take your account from one Ning network to the next?
It's not horrible but it is way too shallow. This is the site where I got my head around json. http://www.JSON.org/js.html

Also, though I'm a huge fan of jquery, this guy's writeup is too specific to that library. In this instance, the nice convenience methods in jquery obfuscate some stuff that you need to know, like how jsonp actually works.

Really read through the site I linked so as to get a good foundation, then this type of low-depth article will be more(or less) useful.
I want a nuclear car: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
I am not yet entirely sure what the compiler does and how one could actually use it. Would it make sense to recompile source code, even third party source code, that is used on a multicore webserver using this compiler in order to gain some performance improvements?
It's not what it is, it is what it isn't:

- political news
- sports news
- 'entertainment' news
- and so on...

There are plenty of places that have all that HN has and more, it's the lack of the 'more' that makes HN a good place to hang out.

edit:

And of course the people here... there seems to be on the whole less immature behaviour here than elsewhere (though it does happen).
Do it like Vimeo.
IE8: This one's for spew
Just want to add that I love the design. Very clean, nice colorscheme, it's gorgeous. Only nitpick would be that the body text in those boxes could be a tiny bit bigger.

(disclaimer: adblock user and the product itself is not of interest to me)
It must be the season to become frustrated by the direct dependencies between subject & observer in the observer pattern. In the GWT world, there was a very good presentation by Ray Ryan about architectural best practices.

One of the gems was using the HandlerManager class as an eventBus, which is the neutral third party that brokers these interactions. It strikes me as an example of the pattern discussed in this article.

http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/GoogleWebToolkitBe...
see this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689521
503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

The link is not working for me, perhaps the first incidence I've seen of a site being "Hacker Newsed" ..
Terabytes Missing From The National Archives: Would the Cloud Be Safer?
This release is mainly the work of Nathan Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein, with a bunch of contributions from other Rubyists. I don't think Hampton worked on this release, and he hasn't been active in Haml/Sass development for a while. That's no knock on Hampton; there's just a tendency to give most of the credit to the initial author of anything (think Perl, or Linux), and in this case other people deserve a bunch of credit, too.
I think the basic problem has more to do with the inability to verify how competent someone is. In the real world I suspect the ability to fake competence is often what is promoted to the highest levels.

But, let's assume each level is independent on every other level and higher levels are also more important. Now how do you promote people? Well find a general measure of how good people are at anything let's call it "g" and then promote people based on that. You are probably thinking that's not fair. Which I think is the real reason people get promoted. If you dangle the possibility of promotion you get people to keep working for a lower immediate reward in the hopes that they will end up being promoted.

So promoting people based on competence at their current job might just be a carrot to keep people working hard for lower rewards.
Sounds like this is how Ning will raise it's next millions of dollars of financing. By giving each person their own "Social Network" they have a way to utilize the existing userbase in a new way and go ask for more money.
Web pioneer Andreessen raises $300M for new venture capital firm
Seems like we didn't need any commentary to figure out and discuss the obvious question.
Generally speaking, there's a level of respect here that you just don't find on the internet. Cooler heads tend to prevail, people value replies that explain rather than criticize even if the original poster was simply wrong, and with rare exception we don't tend to re-post the same thing over and over every couple of weeks.

It's really shocking that the environment hasn't changed as the site has gotten larger. I used to be a tad afraid that as more people joined we'd start getting more of the noise and flame-wars that one sees on other sites.

Sure, it's great that HN has interesting content and often times lets me see new and interesting technologies that I can apply, but really it's the respect that we seem to afford each other that keeps me as an engaged member of the community rather than someone that just lurks. I love discussion, but I have better things to do than fight with people.

I always try to remember what Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan said at a commencement at my university, "it is important to express your views, and sometimes even your anger, but at the same time remember that the noble art of conversation is not a martial art."

Thank you to everyone here who proves daily that we can respect one another on the internet.
Pocket Cemetery: Virtual Graveyard for the iPhone
I come here to learn what interesting people think and how. The links are also very entertaining (too much) but I like most to read the comments.
No Junk (in bold). Useful/Interesting articles.
The closest match of people with the same interests as me - spanning both tech stuff, brainiac stuff, and business stuff - that I've yet to find on the Internets.
Facebook revenue to be billions in 5 years: board member
Ask HN Philly:  Would you use this Start-Up?
Perhaps use white when viewing the video is playing normally on the site and go back to black when viewing in full screen mode.
Quite amazing! Thank you for that, string theory starts to look more and more like it has 'legs'.

To have actual physical phenomenon explained by string theory (and apparently not in any other way) gives it a lot of weight.
Most of organizations in our society have hierarchical structure. The goverment, military, academic, enterprise show you the hierarchical traits in position titles. The pyramid is necessary for managing responsibilities and decision making. Social stratification is normal to all societies to some extend.
This brings few questions:

Can you really trust your platform(cloud) provider? Is your data save? Will you ever be able to get it back?
At least these days a Ning account is global--I just signed up for a Ning powered site a few weeks back and it was made clear early on that the login would work for any Ning site.