skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to disagree with you, but the arguments for the '90%' figure are really wafer thin. It might as well be 60% on average.
Or how about a flash game where you're presented with an empty box. You're told to draw a line of a certain length and you get more points if your line goes over the least popular paths.

It would probably require some pre-crunching of the numbers, but I would imagine you can plot all of the points for the graph in order to determine scoring.

Although thinking about it, I'm not sure if you'd be rewarding randomness or just rewarding deviation from the norm.
I do think the article was a bit much.

At the same time, I notice that during Steve Jobs's absence, the iphone mostly just treaded water, making only fairly incremental improvements to the same basic functionality. A few more years of this and Apple will lose its edge. So Apple certainly needs Steve Jobs, or someone else to fill his role, even if the rest of us don't.
With 18 years between new games and the inability to save, better make sure you're playing at the best of your abilities.
Doing the opposite of everyone is valuable
Just do a search for something you'd like to buy like: http://www.google.com/search?q=computer and typically one of the sponsored links will have the icon.
I'm not sure I fully understood everything you were saying here.

But I would mention that unit tests give you a nice picture of what will break when you DO change your interfaces. The list of broken tests is your new task set.

This is a significant benefit.
Making More Money on the Internet with Content, Visitors, and Clickbank
Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science (2nd Edition)
phpPgAdmin is okay, I think about on par with phpMyAdmin, but I prefer pgadmin3.
Independent Director: The Tie Breaker
I don't think that's true at all; someone who started on MySQL is obviously more comfortable with the MySQL methods, but I can't think of anything about Postgres that makes it more difficult than MySQL for someone with no prior experience. PgSQL definitely has more advanced features, but they can generally be safely ignored if you don't want to utilize them.
Good corrections, but you're still wrong about one thing. Super Rewards did NOT make 140 Mafia. lolplaying did.
There are already plenty of materials for self-study, but what I would really like to see is just the graph itself. What topics do I need to understand to study X? If I want to implement a skeletal animation system, it might tell me I need to know about quaternions and so on.
Anecdotally, I have a 17" Powerbook that I think I bought in 2002. Still fine, although kinda slow. I think about upgrading it from time to time.

As far as maintenance, the contacts for the screen are starting to delaminate 7 years in, I had to have the motherboard replaced after somebody ran into it on a bike (long story), and I replaced the hard drive after it died a few months ago. It's been quite reliable, all told.
How did BSD come in behind windows?
In this day and age, you can do quite a lot with 740k.
The Google logo on the results page is part of a larger image. They use background-position to offset the part that you actually see.

http://www.google.ca/images/nav_logo4.png

For example, the value for the next arrow at the bottom of the page is: "background-position: -76px 0pt;"
Refinements in Rebol http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/concepts/funcs-evaluating.html#...
"Try not to talk about the weather as this usually raises a "red flag", ie I really want to talk to you but dont know how."

This varies depending on the region. If you live somewhere with interesting enough weather (i.e. eastern Washington) it's always a topic of discussion. (in June) "Did you see the snow this morning? That was crazy!" (in July) "Man, it's 100 degrees out. Can you believe it snowed last month?"
PHPUnit Mastery | Engineering Blog - Genius.com Marketing SaaS
Changing Of The Guard: Jeff Weiner Takes CEO Spot At LinkedIn
I didn't notice the change, my mistake.

And no, I don't have an agenda. I don't know this guy, but I know a lynch mob when I see one, and I don't like siding with the pitchforks.
I studied genetics as my major, but that was a while ago (7 years ago now?). Here is the short version of what I remember.

Telomeres are areas of non-expressed DNA at the end of your chromosomes. If the telomeres are too short in a strand of DNA, they are eliminated. (This could happen for a variety of reasons, ranging from replication errors to direct damage to the strand that was being replicated due to exposure to radiation or other mutagens).

When you get older, long-term damage to your DNA means that your telomeres have been slowly getting shorter. When I was a student, the theory was that this was one of the causes of ageing (less and less replications can be done from a strand, etc..)

The research Dr. Wong is doing appears to be about the role of telomeres in patients suffering from a disease where white blood cells have no telomeres attached. One of the therapeutic ideas she is investigating is artificially adding telomeres to see if it has any benefit. Another question raised is whether or not this sort of therapy could apply to retard ageing.

Fascinating stuff, all around.
My suggestion: your bottleneck is highly unlikely to be Python. Most web applications get to wait on DB access, network latency, and then browser rendering. All the backend optimization in the world just gets you to these bottlenecks faster.

(It is also a whole lot of black magic compared to front-end optimization. See any of the presentations by the YSlow guys -- google [high performance web sites] and look for the slides or videos. They give simple, tested, repeatable "do this and it will work" best practices. Backend optimization, on the other hand, relies far too much on handwavy lore and near-useless-or-actually-harmful micro-optimizations. For example, "StringBuffers are sooooooo much faster than String concatenation!")
complex math is beautiful and it does relate to trig nicely (sum of exponentials)

but i'm not sure if complex is useful in stats. in all my stats courses i didn't see any complex, maybe simply because all observations are of real number (height, age, stock price, etc)

oh wait, maybe in the stochastic (cyclostationary process, etc) ... my memory betrays me. oh well, dsp is fun ;)
Unravelling the Canadian Copyright Policy Laundering Strategy
I actually knew that, but that's what happens with hasty comments :-( Thanks for the clarification.
Microsoft Hohm - Home Energy Usage Tracking
Jonathan Heiliger of Facebook: Bridging the Gap Between Dev and Operations
Depending on the type of developer you are looking for, its tough to "filter" them based on their response to that question. YC asks their founders what "hacks" have they done in the past. It's a good question to ask, to see what the person's thought process is.

The most interesting ones I've been asked recently was:

1. Do you know who Joel Spolsky is? What is his most recent venture?

2. What is your favorite software engineering blog, one that we might not have heard of? (so ignore the common ones)

3. What are two technologies you play with at home but has nothing to do with at work? What problem have you solved with it?

4. Reverse a link list. Make any necessary assumptions.
From here, it seems like Russia hasn't quite gotten how democracy works yet. Which is fine--maybe democracy doesn't work for Russia. But Iran's a more promising case.

I hope you'll agree that there's another moral principle at play here: don't shoot peaceful people to death in the streets. I couldn't care less about elections when a government stoops to that.
Cheap way to make intro/how-to videos for a website?
Where's a good place to get cheap how-to/intro videos made for websites? i.e. "Here's what our site is about", "Here's how to use our website".

Like the ones on Common Craft http://www.commoncraft.com

Ideally in the hundred dollar range rather than thousands.
The pictures make it look a lot worse than it actually is.

I have a G1 and the bend isn't noticable unless you lay it flat on the table and look at it in profile.
Something like the twitter one: http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter
Ask HN: Personal Bills Management (hosted) recommendation?
Hi! I have been looking at hosted solutions for a small group for personal bills management (scan bills, archive in DB) with reminders/alerts etc. Looking around hasnt shown much promise (alternatives to jbilling, citrusdb, etc.) and was wondering if there was anything (preferably FOSS) that you could recommend? thanks..

edit- something along the lines of 37signals' solution- http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/585-going-inbox-zero-on-your-paper-mail
I wish I checked the date on the Portfolio article. I didn't realize it was for the May issue.

In Boeing's recent statement they said they need a few weeks to determine the length of the delay. It is not a good sign when it takes weeks to find out how far behind you are.

Prediction Number 2: For every week it takes Boeing to release an updated schedule, the delay will be 1-2 months. I think it will take Boeing 2-3 weeks to release a statement, so that means somewhere between 2-6 months delay. I'll take 6 months.

Boeing lost about $3B in value yesterday and today. Boeing margin on planes is a maximum of about 6%. To me, this means Wall Street thinks about 250 planes (or more) are now delayed. I figured that out by solving $3B / 6%, which is total revenue expected by Boeing when profits are $3B. I took that number and divided by $200MM, which is the approximate sales price per plane. That comes out to be 250 planes (which would result in $3B profit).

Boeing says they would be able to produce about 10 planes per month, eventually ramping up to 16. That means it takes about 2 years for Boeing to make 250 planes.

Checking my numbers, I said a 6 month delay, then there will be 1 year of testing, and then Boeing can start manufacturing. So I predicted somewhere over 18 months, assuming no further problems (yeah right), while Wall Street predicts around 2 years, pending further statements.

Prediction #3: First non-test version 787 delivered to a customer Fall 2011.

I may regret that prediction later in life. :)
I'm young, still gaining real-world experience, and fully aware of the fact that I have very few of the right answers (let alone all of them). Why would I go to the trouble of developing my own tools on a regular basis when other people who are much better at building the tools I need have already done so, and groups have put more effort into them than I will ever be able to. I look around for the best tool to do what I need and very rarely discover that I need to build my own to get what I want.

In my opinion, a much better question along those lines would be what tools you use that you consider indispensable, why, and how do they compare to the alternatives in your opinion.
I think migrating from prototype to maintenance mode is a continuum. For some reason maintenance mode seems to begin (IMHO) some where around 60%--80% of work for version 1.0. At that point it's too risky not to be testing routinely and things should have settled enough that you could depend on some solidified interfaces.

I like this approach to TDD. This feels more efficient than starting with failed test cases on day 1.
To be fair, Jason Bailey's company is profitable and doing 8 digits in revenue a year. How much is Twitter making again?
The answer is, sometimes. :) It all depends on what data you trained with, the variety of light/shape/tilt of the faces, etc. The code can only build on what it knows, so when it fails the best thing to do is dog-food that case and add it to the training set. Of course, outliers like that can also cause more false positives as the decision function has to generalize even more to cover those cases.
More anti-male crap. These genes are necessary for human survival, but academics think everyone lives in a fluffy pink cradle - like them.
I really don't see the relevance of this to anything discussed on HN, does anyone else? I would normally flag this, but I'm aware of Linguistics and Etymology being quite a niche "hacker" interest, so I'll ask for guidance.
I know what you mean. I think grammar can be contagious and I increasingly find myself having to stop and think about what I'm writing.
The Power Of Not Being Positive
Yah and when I go to windows I am baffled, (exe or zip), (win32, dotnet, java, qt, mono, com, python, wxwidgets...., visual studio look-n-feel, explorer look-n-feel, Office look-n-feel)
I've owned 3 macs and built several PCs and owned several PC laptops.

2 of the three macs were just as buggy as all of the PC laptops I've had, but the desktop dual G4 had MANY more issues than my desktops ever had.

On the laptops, my MBP is 3 weeks old and is running great, I love the thing, but I also have a Dell XPS 1530 and it also runs fantastic (yes, with vista, which isn't horrible at all).

Now, if I had to get the MBP serviced, I'd have to contact apple/take it to a store, wait for parts most likely, wait for the swap, possibly pay for the fix, 2-3 days of my spare time wasted on fixing it.

If my XPS broke (I've had a heat issue and an issue with the CDROM), I get online with dell tech support (@ 7pm after work, while the kids eat dinner), a service requested is filed, and within 2 days someone is on site fixing my laptop, while I work/do my normal routine.

I'm a fan of both Windows and OSX (and linux) all for different reasons, but I'd much rather have to deal with Dell's tech support instead of Apples.

On another note, anything with moving parts like a computer, and critical components like a computer, is prone to problems and breaking, doesn't matter which company you buy from, the chances of it breaking are still there.
1 seems much more targeted at entrepreneurs. I would expect most decent developers to have at least tangential knowledge of him because its hard to avoid when frequenting tech blogs, but I would give no positive points for reading him. From what I've seen his posts are mostly self-serving / self-praising and I've gotten very little value out of any of them.
there's a thin line between mildly-interesting-to-hackers and reddit. Be very afraid. :)
While I enjoyed the article, I think the author, like many others, misses or misrepresents what the purpose of TDD is.

He argues that doing TDD is not an effective test strategy and he seems to have a valid point. However, TDD is not about testing, but about design. TDD's claim is that it will guide you towards a better design by allowing you to explore design possibilities, forcing you to think about the responsibilities and collaborations involved. Catching bugs is one of many things you get as a bonus, but it is a bit of an afterthought.

This is a common misconception, but I think it ought to be pointed out.
Ask HN: Is there a key-time-value database?
I'm looking for a way to store kev-value pairs that change over time and maintain the key-value history.

I'd also like to be able to retrieve the key-values for a segment of time in the past.

Does anything like this already exist?
A similar example is how Google renders the histograms on the Google Stock Screener - they use tables instead of an image.

http://www.google.com/finance/stockscreener
I always find this peculiar when google says they found users were doing fewer searches when they increased the # of results on the serp to 20 or 30. Maybe when a user sees more results they find what they were looking for more quickly, and so don't have to do another search. Yet google always turns this around and says this is bad because users do fewer searches. I guess from google's perspective, revenue-wise, it's bad. But from a user's perspective, it's good. Do no evil?
You can now share files on FriendFeed
Memphis doctor confirms Steve Jobs' liver transplant
The number of failed credit card authorizations each month sounds like a useful economic indicator. There might be quants on Wall Street that could do something interesting with that sort of data.
i've also found an inverse relationship between blog reading and hacking, both in myself and others. i'd almost take off points if a new hire was too much into online procrastination or vanity blogging.

certainly there are developers i respect who are fairly ocd when it comes to reading hn and reddit. it's just stuff to do when chillin'; to each his own.

big ups to building tools and open source communities, though. getting things done is the awesome.
Why does everyone here hate Flash so much? I agree that Flash has weaknesses...but the combination of animation tools and concepts - combined with software controlled interactivity is a direction I wish the entire web would embrace. Flash is visually appealing... some of the movie sites like UP (http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/up/main.html) are simply amazing.
We're building a casual MMO, and find that our user base is 50/50 male/female. This is awesome for building a community (nobody wants a sausage-fest), but hard for gameplay, as the 2 groups want totally different things...
War Book reveals how Britain planned to cope with nuclear attack
I believe the point of the question was to see if I had heard of him, not necessarily if I agree or read his blog.

The question asked said "#startups" so I assumed it was referring to hiring founders or founding employees (your first employees). Founding employees should have similar qualities as the founders. They could very well have started their own company if they didn't come join your startup.
Ah, id software. A relic from the time when PC gaming was exciting and relevant.
Is that a veiled compliment? I quite like being called a hippie.
Actual metrics from a Facebook RPG. Interesting read...
From Eric Ries: RT @amyjokim: STATS!!! excellent slides from @blader @deekay #sgs09
By countless do you mean a handful?
IPhone App Developers: Do Not Fear the Lite
Ask HN: Script to collect iTune sales stats?
Has anyone written a script to collect daily sales figures from an iPhone app? I wish I didn't have to click so much to get my numbers.
Assuming you mean in the USA, we don't have a democracy it's a republic, which means we definitely do have central planning committees, but they are appointed by politicians who are voted into office by the people. It's not quite "Soviet totalitarianism", but it's several steps removed from voters.
http://www.earthclassmail.com/
Given that conforming with the standard is effectively free, do you have any other justification for your non-conformal position of "I'd say 64 is enough. Anything above is just weird"?

Willfully and capriciously ignoring standard requirements that you think are "weird" results in non-conformal implementations that confound users and other developers attempting to interoperate with your systems. I'm genuinely surprised to be writing a paragraph defending standards conformance -- I'd have thought that this position was basic common sense among software developers.
none ref link for those inclined to make a purchase

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/d...
"your bottleneck is highly unlikely to be Python. Most web applications get to wait on DB access, network latency, and then browser rendering"

I second that. My experience is first look into the DB time and second browser rendering. I have thought Python was the cause for slowness many times and each time it again proved to be DB time. Also, don't run multiple selects to the database for a set of records, make it one select.
so don't use Outlook. problem solved.
The solution this article references was basically a table with 1x1 cells that had their background colors set via CSS classes. I was on the team with the guy who did the hack when I was an intern. That was about three years ago.

At some between then and now, Google actually went back to using a real image for it, and now it looks like it's just a CSS sprite.
Look through the rest also - the advice really varies. I found the part about avoiding browser reflow [1] very useful. Just last night, I was getting usability issues with a piece of JS which was executing with each keystroke and (I now realize) sometimes causing reflow. I fixed it, but now I know what was broken :)

1. http://code.google.com/speed/articles/reflow.html
I don't think that hitting the 'next page of results' counts as a search. And whether they display 10 results initially forcing the user to hit 'next' twice to see all 30 results instead of just displaying 30 results outright... the search result set is still the same. If those 30 results don't contain what the user is looking for, they will still have to perform another search.

I guess this is assuming that people don't just re-search with different terms if what they are looking for isn't right there on the first page.
Linux installs on supercomputers often aren't "stripped down" when compared to a typical server install. Instead, they're customized, often at the kernel level. A Linux install on a PS3 is mostly just a stock PowerPC kernel and user-land binaries, with some kernel patches for communication with the Cell's SPEs. Such customization is infeasible in Windows. (It's possible, just really hard. You could try to get Microsoft to do it, but that's unlikely. Microsoft does allow certain groups to get access to the source code, but that's not easy. And even with access, I assume it's hard to make changes since, as proprietary code, there's less global knowledge and resources to help you.)

That is the key reason why Linux is used instead of Windows for supercomputers: customization.

As for Linux versus BSD, the short answer is Linux is more popular. The long answer - why Linux is more popular - I don't know.
Being curious is easy. Acting on it is harder. You may wonder why the world is the way it is, but then you realize that reading about it takes a lot of time and effort. Most people are lazy. It happens that school is a great curiosity-killer, but people kill their own curiosity as well as soon as they discover that the answers to their endless questions affect their daily lives very little.
But what incentive do the big players have for improving the Linux desktop? The server/computational node is where they're invested.
There’s That Facebook “Everyone Button” We Told You About
In your original post, you said:

> Other operating system provide much more productive human interfaces which enhances productivity far more than raw processing power ever will. (emphasis added)

I disagree with that. A highly customized Linux (or BSD) interface can be much more productive than other operating systems.

Yes, you're right that sitting down at a random Mac (Aqua) or Windows box is easier to pick up and get going, but that does not rule out that for daily use a tuned Unix desktop environment can be much more productive than the others would ever be.
For those possibly confused (like me): this is not a new edition of Concrete Mathematics. It's the text of the published book, but typeset astoundingly poorly. The actual book is sublimely set, as one might expect from Knuth.

The content of the work is very difficult for me, but I think it worthwhile. I doubt it'll be that much use to a non-mathematical audience, tho.
Yep, a credit check is par for the course, even for SIM-only contracts (ie bring your phone). This generates some extra cash for the telecoms by forcing some people to the much more expensive pay as you go plans.
How much is Twitter making again?

What does it matter? They're certainly not starving (yet).
These hippies started up something from scratch, are having an incredibly fun time doing it, getting funded, making waves and headlines and may yet make money. Ev already got loads of cash from selling Blogger before. And wasn't that the same question people asked of Amazon and Google before? How much were they making two years after launch?
The types of tools I'm referring to are generally specific to the work you are doing. For instance I developed a tool that is able to parse logs of HL7 messages from our programs and then resend them with various options for testing and debugging purposes.