skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone tried it - http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2009/03/06/trying_to_game_swoopo_c... - and couldn't get that to work.

The author does some interesting pattern analysis of how auctions actually work, and concludes (roughly) that you can't beat BidButler.
Uh, what it says. The author has a theory about why XHTML2 didn't succeed, and he's explaining what it is. The W3C recently shut down the XHTML2 working group, hence the pun in the title.
First sentence: ...why the XHTML2 Working Group failed...
Free, high-resolution, and large-scale Burnt Paper Textures
totally unnecessary for the kind of topics covered on HN. A lot of posts aren't time sensitive at all, and the ones that are generate enough interest without making the process any easier.
Not to mention those are the first 7 places a thief looks while searching your house.
A proposal for Massachusetts Non-Competes v2.0
I'm not a programmer either, but as someone with an econ undergrad degree going into grad school both the data/analysis and the method of obtaining it are really of interest to me. If anyone can point me in the right direction in terms of what I would need to create such a script I'd be willing to do the work and share the results here.
A small subset of the Blogging community would be good with marketing, but not everyone.

And for the same purpose there is are plenty of PR firms that specialize in advertising online and in the social networking world (not just ads, but designing virals campaigns etc)... and they have much better contacts all around and the ability for you to expand outward from online advertising and marketing to other's easily as well (TV/Radio/Billboard/etc)
Stack of cash in the freezer? What do I look like, a Congressman?

I think I'll keep my stash in the ATM, thanks.
Counterpoint; Will Wilkinson on urban farming: http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/07/08/urban-farm...
Cruising Fisherman's Wharf For New Passports' Serial Numbers
That's good to hear. As an aspiring indie game developer, the article is depressing but your comment inspired a little hope.
Looks neat, but if I'm going to go through the trouble of setting up a PHP IDE, I want it to have breakpoints.
Looks like a system based on electrostatic lenses rather than the electromagnetic lenses commonly used in TEM today.

Background:
http://books.google.com/books?id=y0FF19lud5YC&pg=PA162&#...
That's not an auction site, it's a social psychology thesis.
Staticmatic is another static site generator that might be close to what you are looking for. You can write your pages in Haml and Sass, so in addition to much simpler markup and the ability to use inline textile and markdown, you can also pull the header and footer out into partials.

http://staticmatic.rubyforge.org/

http://github.com/staticmatic/staticmatic/tree/master
There's an implicit assumption in his argument that the mean is stable and finite. This need not be the case, and is often not the case with tail events under power-law distributions:
http://navanitarakeri.com/Diversification.pdf

Also see the following:
Didier Sornette and Daniel Zajdenweber, The economic return of research: the Pareto law and its implications, European Physical Journal B, 8 (4), 653-664 (1999)

here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/9809366

There's also an excellent (and old) study on whether restaurants with specialized menus did better than restaurants with diverified menus. Turns out the specialized ones did well in the short term, but were vulnerable to sharp changes in taste by patrons. The more diversified ones had much higher longevity but did relatively poorly in the short term. I can't find the reference right now.

Finally, this "Fox vs. Hedgehog" problem is widely studied, and the research shows that the decision is very dependent on the market and domain - i.e it is difficult to generalize.
Scala is my next choice
"One more irrational impulse Swoopo caters to is an urge to believe that there must be some strategy that beats the system."
Edit: Maybe there's an explanation for this but it still seems fishy to me.

How is it possible that the same people placed the same bids (in the same order) and end up with exactly the same amount for two different items in two different countries?

http://www.swoopo.com/auction/apple-macbook-mb466ll-a-13-3-i...
http://www.swoopo.de/auktion/msi-x-slim-x340-su3523-weiss-/1...

(The links above are provided in the followup).

What is the probability of this happening? This means that even if they were all following these two items and placing the bids in the same order, nobody else outside of this group has placed a bid.
Forget Shorter Showers
I discovered Swoopo, as many people do, through an online ad plugging its latest deal, a fancy desktop computer at more than 90 percent off

See here! This is the problem with ads. You see ads, you click it, and you regret it. This author would be better off without ever having seen the ad.

Block ads. They are bad for you.
Federating PubSubHubbub
Ruby on Rails default templates now comes with HTML5 doctype
EDIT: At first I thought they were just putting up dummy back-dated auctions to make the site seem more popular (and the deals better).

But check out the related auctions across the top for both pages -- the same numbers with the same winning bidders with the same (or similar!) products. All of them. So Germans are indeed bidding against US users -- one in dollars, the other in Euros? That doesn't make any sense

http://www.swoopo.de/auktion/fujitsu-siemens-amilo-xi-3650/1...
http://www.swoopo.com/auction/asus-n90-series-n90sv-x1-18-4-...

Same ID number at the end of the URL. All the auctions appear to span both sites: http://www.swoopo.com/auction/x/194481.html
http://www.swoopo.de/auktion/x/194481.html
This one actually does the dollars to euros conversion properly

So clearly people just get an item "similar" to the one they won. You'd think for the massive house advantage they have, they could at least deliver the exact product that you thought you won.
Sablonase kaos
about sablonase
Honey I cleaned out the freezer. Look how nice it is now.

Noooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There are tons of such companies, even here in Finland: http://www.arcticstartup.com/2008/03/26/fiksuhuutofi-smart-b...
The water is being stolen by the military!? Flagged.
"Tel Aviv search for mattress containing $1M life savings":

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/10/israel.mattress.mo...
The Real Hustle did a nice reconstruction of one of the mock auctions you're talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o1zdm7ANVw
Productive work with the iPhone
Yes I agree. A whole lot of rituals would seem funny/bizarre to westeners. An american friend of mine found "arranged" marriages very very strange, he couldn't comprehend it at all. But it has been working very well for centuries in India.

Similarly, when I came to US, I was shocked at the size of shopping malls, had never seen such mega malls in India (India does have big malls, but nothing compared to the ones in US). Also I found the pointless lawsuits very amusing (like the guy who sued his drycleaners for some 50 mil USD).

Well, I guess these differences is what makes life interesting :-)
That's very much like Blatter: http://bitbucket.org/jek/blatter/src/
What is the impact on the food produced of growing plants in soil contaminated with lead paint or motor oil, for example?
"Evil: preying on human weakness for your own personal gain at others' expense".

I could easily make a dozen arguments where respectable companies do exactly that. For instance, is Starbucks preying on the "weakness" of humans that desire caffeine? Is EA preying on the weakness of humans that desire an escape via gaming? By your definition of evil, everyone and everything participating in a capitalist economy is evil.

Frankly i see nothing wrong with Swoopo, even if some end up worse off than they would have been had they not participated. This is because i place the burden of responsibility on the actor, not the facilitator. Caveat Emptor.
He also asserts that IE started the browser wars. As I recall, there was competition from the very beginning, with Netscape Navigator battling with NCSA mosaic. And even upon the advent of IE, you've got to turn your sites toward AOL as well.
No surprise, the basic idea is based on the "dollar auction" which has been a pretty standard part of every undergrad economics class for the past 20 or 30 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction
Ask HN: Is there a survey tool, letting users see the survey results?
Ask HN:Is there a survey tool, letting users see the survey results?
This wasn't about how much food she is growing. What was surprising?
If you read PEP 318, http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/, it's easy to see how much thought went into what is syntactic sugar.
Ahem, actually it's just a scam, in it's purest form. No, it doesn't qualify as gambling because your chance to win is not determined by luck but solely at the discretion of the people running the show.

Imagine you enter a casino and someone offers you the following game:

There's a red button, one push costs $1. Anyone may push as often as they want and can afford. If the button isn't pushed for one hour then the last person who had pushed receives $1000 USD (fixed).

Fine you may think, I'll come here at thanksgiving when nobody is around and push it then. Except that there's always this one sleazy guy lurking in the corner, even at thanksgiving, with that strangely swollen thumb and an seemingly unlimited budget...
shrug

All you need is a 3$ bottle of white board cleaning spray
Ok what's the downside to using the new doctag? What about old IE6 users? I have a new site going online tomorrow and would be willing to go HTML5 as long as it won't kill older browsers.
Somewhat unrelated, but is there a javascript library that I can use to generate html strings which can be used similarly to your lisp code? i.e., something like this:

var users = [...];
var s = h3("Hacker News Consists of the following people:");
s += ul({id: 'user-list'}, map(li({'c': "userel"}), users));
Probably the world's number one example of urban farming is Shanghai: "The magazine Urban Agriculture describes how Shanghai has in effect created a nutrient recycling zone around the city. The municipal government manages 300,000 hectares of farmland to recycle the city’s night soil. Half of Shanghai’s pork and poultry, 60 percent of its vegetables, and 90 percent of its milk and eggs come from the city and the immediately surrounding region. " (source: http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch11_ss4.htm)

Of course, you're not going to this kind of scale from scattered community gardens.
If you really want to get stuff done you shouldn't work 60 hour weeks, and certainly not 90 hour weeks.

The thing is that nobody can keep sharp and do sustainable good work for that long. You need breaks, you need outside friends, you need inspiration and you need time to think about what you're doing instead of just charging ahead and pulling hours.

It all sounds very impressive, but the results rarely are.

As an example, the two guys that wrote the V8 javascript engine for the Chrome browser worked between 35 and 40 hours a week out of a small cottage in the countryside. At five o clock they were home. And no weekend work. Yet they managed to pull off what is arguably the best javascript engine the world has yet seen, and did so in less than a year. Two guys.

They succeeded because they had time to think about what they were doing while they were having dinner, wandering in the woods or whatever two guys in a cottage do when they aren't working.
http://hotpads.com has about 350k rental listings spread all over the US, and none are from craigslist.
Want to keep your wallet? Carry a baby picture
There are none in the Bible. The closest you get are exhortations about work, or warnings about pursuing money. Some folks extrapolate from there, but the arguments against it are always indirect. More often than not, they're not scriptural at all, but are based on practical wisdom ("It destroys lives! It's unproductive!") that doesn't have a lot of basis in actual practice.

It's not anything like widespread enough that you could say it was a "Christian teaching," though. While you can still find people who say it's sinful (and you will always be able to), it's getting so that standard Southern Baptist Sunday School materials say, "Is Gambling a Sin? Well . . . not reeeeeaaallly . . . but we don't think it's a good idea." And I think those guys are usually just about the last to let go of issues like that.
It isn't clear exactly what he is arguing against. Does he take exception to the term "urban farming" because it contains the word "farming"? What is the connection between the fact that farmers in Iowa overgrow a handful of crops because the government pays them to and people wanting to garden in the city?
You mean a doctype.
IE6 users won't be affected if you declare the HTML5 elements in JS, as described here: http://html5doctor.com/how-to-get-html5-working-in-ie-and-fi...
Enjoy your life. How long do you have your youth and health? The car accident was your wake up call, but it seems that maybe the impression wasn't big enough. When you're laying there dying will you be thinking of your wife or your startup? Yeah, it's cliche and a little harsh, but true nonetheless.

You said you are a consultant so maybe you can reduce your gigs and take a bit less cash in order to get some time back. Are you willing to sacrifice for that? Moving to the bay is going to make this more difficult due to the cost of living. If your wife isn't working, is she willing to do it to make up some of that lost $ to have more time with you?

Have you considered partnering to reduce the workload/decrease the time to market? Are you a hard core networking kind of guy that can go to the valley and make something happen? Despite the stigma, I don't believe going to the valley will magically make you or your startup successful. What are you really gaining by going there? I'm not dogging it...hell, if I didn't have kids, I'd move from Ohio to the bay in 1/2 a second. The surfing and lifestyle there may be worth having less money if you don't have to work more just to pay for the higher cost of living.

If you don't take time to enjoy your life, you won't really be happy, even if your startup is successful, unless that's the only thing you care about and it's where you actually derive all of your happiness. I don't think most people fall into that category.

Here's something that works for me...When you make time for your wife, even if it is only 1/2 hour, focus on her and really make the time count. Doing funny/special/dorky things for her will not only make up for the times when you have to or want to work more, she'll return it to you (assuming she's a good woman) and this will recharge your batteries in a way nothing else can. Well, it's true for me anyway. :)
Also, tag helpers for audio and video HTML5 tags have been pushed to edge rails - http://bit.ly/PGV5B

So doctype change must've been made mainly to support these tags.
Wow it even picked up a backwards lambda as lambda.
Perhaps I don't completely understand your reasoning, but I'd side with your wife. You're kidding yourself (or is it killing?!).

Why would your geographic location or the work habit of random strangers change who you are? What about taking some time off your bootstrapping startup until you can get on a healthier footing?
The food has lead or other contaminants in it.
I managed it, though it thought it was Omega first (I had a curve to my Pi though). When I used straight-line Pi it got it first go. Maybe it's more trained now.
That car accident should have been a wake-up call. Cut down your hours on either the consulting or the startup.

Work from home more. If your "client" doesn't like it, remind them of this: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/ocga/vupolicies/consulting/employe...
Has Silicon Valley Peaked?
Fool - that's the first place where these people look.
I'm surprised to see that it doesn't mention's Dijkstra's aphorism:

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to
students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as
potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond
hope of regeneration.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655-S00/readings/ewd498....
How The Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Paycheck
A Happy Ending is so close, yet so far
"We Bring Fear"
where ever you go - there you are.

It might be more important for you to focus on how to be more effective in the time that you do have - have you ever considered connecting with some sort of meditation program - this is your life man - it's not about how much you work - it's about what you choose and where you direct your limited time on this earth.

Sounds like you could learn to slow down.
Lest anyone doubt that corn is overproduced, here are some actual numbers:

http://www.card.iastate.edu/iowa_ag_review/winter_07/article...

See the paragraph titled "Corn Utilization and Surpluses for 2004".

This of course wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that we (US taxpayers) pay for it. The artificially low price of corn has also led to a glut of processed garbage being sold back to us.
This is awesome, and it works. My only quibble is that it doesn't seem to handle accented characters, ie it finds \aa, presumably because that's a single symbol, but it doesn't find \"{a} and it doesn't even seem to show up in the training list.
Well, you need a Firefox with installed greasemonkey, which is an extension that allows you to run your scripts on a page that you're looking at in Firefox. The scripts have to be written in Javascript. The script will have to locate the <div> element that contains the bidding history, then once a second copy the part of its content that was updated since last time to another <div> - where ALL bidding history on this page will accumulate. Then, when the auction ends, copy the contents of this div into excel or whatever you use for analysis and parse it (i. e. put time, price and username into different cells).

In the link above provided by JimmyL, the author says that he wrote such a script (and gives a description of his experiment). Try to email him, I think he'll share it.
was this cottage on Brokeback Mountain? kidding
Ha, Australia's too small to even have an Amazon! I have to order from the US and get it shipped.

Which is why it boggles the mind that we can have a comprehensive supermarket delivery service and they don't. Wonder what the reason is. I know both the UK and AU have pretty consolidated groceries markets, a limited number of big players with nationwide presence - maybe US supermarkets are just too fragmented?
I should point out that I drastically simplified what was involved, attempting to give an idea of the scope rather than the nitty gritty details. In fact they helpfully provide a set of schema files defining exactly the class layout for each class read in each version. Much of the actual work involved figuring out how to interpret those files into useful code. And of course we did not try to support parsing every possible class from every possible version before we tried importing simpler files from the versions we already understood. Believe me, if anything I am too impatient to see real results rather than too patient.

My fundamental point was that it both took a long time to develop the parsing stage and there was no opportunity for useful customer feedback to be had during that development. In order to make a marginally usable importer, the code had to be able to parse nearly every type. The customer could not tell me what to skip. There was just no way for them to provide useful feedback at this stage other than "these are the sorts of files we need to be able to read."

As a programmer, I aggressively attempt to not implement features my customers do not need. It is the only plausible way to write this sort of code as a one-man shop. But as feedback, it usually works the other way around -- I implement the minimum needed to make the files they send me work for them. So it's not me saying "Do you need this?", it's them saying, "Hey, we need this."
this is not at all related to the essence of the commit, but as the rails guys are using git which brings us the beauty that is rebase -i, why is this commit so incredibly bad?

It mixes functional changes and whitespace changes. It even contains functional changes not related to the commit message.

I would never dare to submit a commit like this into our internal repository, much less to a public one.

I know. Just nitpicking, but having the possibility of creating "clean" commits in a reasonable amount of time is one of the nice features of git. Why not use them?
Rails 3 is supposedly going to add helpers for adding HTML5 data attributes ( http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-data-attributes ) at some point, too.
Along that vein, I'm curious about the inflection of this quote regarding her homemade prosciutto: "It proves you can make really good pork off of dumpster scraps." I hope it's sarcastic, or saying that she would have thrown the pork away otherwise, but something is nagging at me to take it at face value. Some chemical contaminants might actually taste good.
I can't vote, so I'll comment :)

I'm the first person to recommend a life that is spent "poured into" something that's bigger than yourself.

Having said that, dude! You may be crossing the line into some kind of behavior problem. Just something to think about.

They say the definition of a problem is when you let something take over other areas of your life. If you're working 80+ hours a week (and I've done it) on a continual basis you don't have a rest of your life. Adding to that is this idea that somehow living in a different place is going to change your behavior? You may imagine those 5 days a week surfing now while you're in Atlanta, but when you get there you're going to be the same 80+ hour guy you are right now.

I wouldn't move -- at least if you think moving is going to fix this lifestyle thing. (I would move perhaps for other reasons though)

That's my totally uneducated and off-the-wall comment, fwiw.
"be totally ruthless about using your time efficiently and if at any time you feel that you can't, clock out for the day and go enjoy life."

This is fantastic advice. Time spent sitting at the computer willing yourself to work when you're not in the mood is as -- if not more so -- personally draining as actually getting stuff done. Don't waste your valuable attention on half-assed work.

(Incidentally, I'm on HN right now b/c I'm ignoring my own advice. We have a new customer starting on the 15th, and I'm pushing out our current development release by then if it kills me.)
What about if nearly everyone is worse off? Putting the burden of responsibility on the actor is fine, but Swoopo is not in the same category as Starbucks and EA, and claiming that everyone participating in a capitalist economy does so at the expense of others is pretty disingenuous.
Bootstrapped startups often use part-time non-startup work as funding for their actual product. All indications are that it is very hard to keep your focus and energy high enough to make progress, but all indications are also that any way you start your business is hard.

37signals still did one week design reviews after basecamp launched. MailChimp launched in 2001 but the team continued to do web development on the side until 2006.

If you aren't doing a venture backed startup, you need cash. You can either burn through your savings, build a consulting practice around your product (I did this with CrowdVine), or have side work.

When I made the switch to go full time on CrowdVine I gave up an agile software development training gig in favor of consulting for CrowdVine customers. I think it was the wrong move and that the training gig, which only took six days a month, would have been a lot more effective way to bootstrap.