skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One interesting bit is that BillG reads Gizmodo and was compelled enough to mail a story in.

When he wrote comments for his Thinkweek papers (atleast until the last one), I was always amazed by how much he kept track of stuff happening on the web. He would usually know the nitty gritty of some API of some hot new site on the web. He would have test accounts in every hot new social networking site and would have installed and played with every new product, Microsoft and non-Microsoft. He would also have very sharp, insightful commentary on macro strategy as well as micro-level tactical issues.

I think the sad part is that very rarely have people seen that BillG outside of Microsoft. My feeling is that people outside MSFT have this slightly stereotyped image which is either a) evil corporate overlord who got lucky b) wimpy software nerd billionaire or more and more c) wealthy old philanthropist.

I don't think any of the 3 are really accurate or do justice to him.
One of my clients is making an app (non-public) where everything is done by handing out cards with barcodes, which are then scanned in.

We were very close to buying a couple thousand cuecats for it. I don't remember why we didn't, I think because they were not reliable (sliding the wand, vs. point and click for the gun types).
Did You Mean: Recursion?
they are a company who needs to serve their customers interests or they will go out of business

Well, in this case, they have two sets of customers - publishers and readers. Congress debated and decided that authors have certain rights - the right to sell copyrighted work with protection from copying, production of derivative works, performance, etc.

In particular, it includes the right to withdraw sold books.

How exactly should Amazon decide which of these rights are "moral" or "immoral", and take them away from one set of customers for the sake of the perceived rights of another set.
I have a couple as well, one still plugged into to my PC at work. I never understood why people thought it was such a terrible idea.
Out of curiosity, what sort of structure do you envision?
Nice Post :
However, "There are 'extremists' in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred." -> I find this quote a bit rough. Linus should not care about it. It's like you do not call yourself a hacker because media don't know the difference between hacker and cracker.
It was one of the "good" forgeries.
Just because Amazon can do it, it doesn't mean they can be forced to by a publisher. The copyright laws are broken, but in this case it was Amazon's mistake.
If we were talking about typical cases, we wouldn't be talking about starvation at all, or about the US; we'd be talking about people in India dying of heart attacks and pneumonia. I don't know enough about how cause-of-death coding works in the US to know whether you're right about the cause-in-fact of typical deaths coded as due to nutritional deficiency.

But your claim wasn't that starving to death was atypical. Surely we can all agree that it's atypical. Your claim was that it hadn't happened even once in our lifetimes, except due to mental illness. That's the claim that outraged me.

It's true that there are a lot of charitable services in the US. There are people they don't reach, as I'm sure you know.
Students Build a Car the Blind Can Drive
Humans Glow
All about chicken recipes
One of the best sources of protein is chicken. It has been proved that chicken provides approximately 67.6% of protein in just 4 ounces. Since the major building blocks of humans are proteins, it is no wonder that many people are turning towards chicken recipes as they are also able to derive many amino acids.
I just like hg because it has -- in my opinion -- a saner interface and a more useful branch strategy for the types of stuff I'm usually doing.

The fact that it has a good Python API (courtesy of being written in Python) is a nice bonus.
Seems silly to make a web app of Latitude but I'm not sure what else would be gained from creating an iPhone app. I'm really interested to see what happens in this space (for Brightkite too, etc) when or if Apple lets us write services for location tracking.
Catch the (Adobe) Wave
Actually, a pretty big feature of high-level languages is being reminded over and over that you never need to re-write the vast majority of most programs. For many tasks, two lines of awk or half a page of Python is quite sufficient. (And when something is a legitimate hotspot and benefits from being rewritten in C, it's not selling out. Where the heck did that idea come from?)
I just finished building this for a client: http://sftheaterbuzz.org/

It's a little sad because there are no reviews yet...but I don't think he's had time to promote it yet.
I just hope Apple doesn't decide to encrypt that xml file just for the sake of keeping its garden walled...
I think this is going to quickly turn into a game of chicken. Who can afford to annoy their users more with software updates?
Not sure if it was distributed outside the US, I would guess not... so it's (mostly) new to me. The kinds of things we miss out on, up here in Canada ;)
I'm working on an app to track work orders for a client. Not exactly riveting, but it's my first real gig and it feels really good to get paid to program.
That, is awesome.
Contributing patches is an option, too. There's a shortage of people in the open source world who are good at UI design.
"I've also gotten used to the workflow, which I'm sure differs under Mercurial."

Yes and no.

The workflow for managing branches is different, because you usually just clone an hg repo to do a branch, and then merge as needed.

The workflow for more complex things isn't quite as different as most people seem to think, though; mainly the difference is that in hg the answer is "use a patch queue". Operations on patch queues are somewhat lower level than, say, git's rebase, but all the power is still there (and there's a rebase extension which will let you do it all in one go if that's your thing).

What's been interesting to me is seeing the evolution of the "popular" git workflow over time. Originally, people hyped things like rebasing and editing commit history, but gradually the emphasis has shifted away from that and the best practices have solidified around using those features only when they're necessary, which is much less often than a lot of folks originally believed. And, amusingly, that's very close to the way hg has always been used: you can do lots of fancy stuff, but you should have a good reason for doing so (and should typically never do so after you've pushed to other folks or they've pulled from you).
working on the beta version of Leftos (LEssons For The Opposite Sex) http://leftos.com -- an online dating/relationship advice social network. Building this for a client.
JQuery Content Expansion: Give your code more breathing room
Shortest MapReduce Application
Kite Surrfing
Power Kites
A power kite is a large kite that is designed to pull along the user attached to it. There are three forms of power kites that are available viz. foils, leading edge inflatable and supporting leading edge. The control system used on these kite also varies with some having 2 lines and others having 5 lines
http://woodgears.ca
http://chartgame.com
I doubt it. The eye is able to see a single photon. So if humans glowed at all, people should be able to see it.
Crashed safari for me as well... Agreed, it would be better if this were an iphone app. Way too slow even on a wifi connection.
PHP is now on Github
For the most part, I agree with Linus. MS shouldn't be excluded, or hated solely because it's MS.

But, that doesn't mean they should be welcomed with open arms, either. MS has done some nasty stuff to us (OOXML, FUD campaigns, patent threats, et cetera). I recognize that companies are large and fluid, but they should still be held accountable.

MS has recently decreased their evil_count in my books, but they still have a long way to go...

With companies I trust, I ``trust, but verify''. With MS, I ``distrust until verified.''
Very interesting piece - learned a lot. This part was the most insightful to me:

--

Mr. Brücker looked the part of a luxury customer, wearing Car Shoe moccasins and an IWC Big Pilot watch, which has shock absorbers to help it keep time under rough flying conditions. He used PowerPoint to impart what he calls the “macaroon technique,” referring to the sandwich-like French macaron pastry. This can be applied to most any product (including, presumably, a Xerox machine) and goes something like this:

“Madam, this timepiece (or diamond or handbag) comes from our finest workshop and it has a value of $10,000. If you buy it, your children are sure to enjoy it for generations to come.”

That pesky number is sandwiched between the product’s more romantic benefits. “We sell luxury—it’s an emotion,” Mr. Brücker instructed.
Although he's a billionaire, I doubt his sense of value has changed. Especially since he is so close to retail.
Though I agree with you for the most part, depending on how much you care it's sometimes silly to fight a de facto, I don't say I'm "hacking on a project" to someone non-technical unless I'm prepared to spend a few moments explaining my use of the word. Like calling an Add() function that you know from experience returns a product and getting annoyed at the result.
AOL load this page slowly for anyone else?

Direct: http://www.livescience.com/health/090722-body-glow.html
Precisely.

Just because one has a very sharp knife does not mean one should wave it around in casual conversation.
Open-source code is really only "open" to the people who know how to read it and write it and modify it. This excludes about 99.725 percent of the population. Proprietary code people are less rare.

So one of the reasons I chose to modify zentu.net's tagline from a "FOSS"-oriented tagline to an "OSS"-oriented one is precisely that . . . I admire Stallman's and Torvalds' benevolences and all, but people cannot work for free. FOSS is too often misclassified (by the MS camp) as being cheap, when in actuality it is just as valuable as proprietary. Anybody who wants to can get into any code base and can contribute value; it's totally binary. So I have to agree with Torvalds here.

Although I've never really "hated" Microsoft, I have felt really robbed by its lack of payment or even acknowledgment to me for all of my hours of service on their systems. It excluded the outside "people" factor from its business model, and that is why I think so many people are perturbed by it. OSS at least attempts to give individuals credit for their work.
Dragonfly makes you select the tab you want to work on before you can work on it- instead of defaulting to the open tab.

The rest of the UI suffers from similar problems. Everything is there, it's just buried, set to a bad default, etc.

They really ought to steal from firebug more wholeheartedly.
Review my start-up
Been working on this for a short time, and wanted some feedback. It's a dating site (yes another, however, this one is more social networking oriented). I would appreciate some constructive feedback so I can improve on it.

http://mikesandmegs.com
There is even a lively market in blog themes for individuals.
I haven't taken a Calculus course yet... But I've thoroughly enjoyed learning it on my own. I've proved the laws I work with (except chain rule...).

I think it's probably been the richest part of my math experience.
I know I'm supposed to feel class envy when reading about watches which are more expensive than salaries I have recently worked for, but I've got to admit fascination with the linen glove treatment. The psychology of putting the old watch between two new ones and having a wingman distract the wife is very amusing.

Now if I could just figure out a way to do that for software which costs a thousandth as much.

This sort of makes me want to put on my best business suit, walk to the luxury jewelry store I pass on the way home from work, and take some notes on their tactics.
I just posted this link on Facebook, and told a friend who works for a nonprofit organization that has a Facebook page about it. This is important information for people who support nonprofit organizations.
The difference:
when my iphone's mic inexplicably died, the apple store just replaced the unit. I swung by a store, they confirmed the broken hardware, grabbed a new device, swapped the sim card and i went home and restored from my backup. it took 10 minutes in the store and 10 more at home.

when my 360 died, microsoft left it up to their partner (best buy). who hassled me about their absurd return policy despite my having purchased their extended service plan that clearly covered the situation. after a frustrating experience that required forty-five minutes of my time and escalation past the first tier of management, i did get new hardware.

I then got home and found out that the XBox Live content i'd purchased was tied to my old (now-dead) hardware. If i didn't have an active internet connection, it couldn't be used on the new hardware. Most times I'm connected, so it wasn't a -huge- deal -- but it still bit me in the ass a few times until Microsoft released their fix for the DRM situation (18 months later).

To sum-up: the value Apple offers isn't in the hardware specs. It's in the single point of responsibility, excellent customer service and lack of bullshit.

I don't know a single person who fits the straw man of 'buying apple to be cool'. Everyone I actually know who owns apple products switched out of sheer frustration with the Microsoft model of eighteen levels of indirection and blame game nonsense whenever anything goes wrong.
fun little text editor called WHOAD (sort of like woah dude or word heuristic occurrence analysis diagram). Trying it in flex v.s. the jquery version I currently have.
Did you build that on a framework or do it from scratch?

I'm trying to see how many people go with existing frameworks for this sort of thing.
Ask HN: Tips for negotiating site sale
Tomorrow I am meeting with a potential buyer for my 2 year project. I've provided him with the traffic statistics since the first of the year, and he has been the long time sponsor of the site, so we have a previous standing relationship.

I've never negotiated a sale of my own project before. I've negotiated for higher salaries and benefits etc.

So what tips or advice can you all provide? Any tips on negotiating? Any advice on preparation I might have overlooked?
My first reply to you consisted of a series of questions, asking for more information (which you kindly provided). No, my claim was that the current economic crisis, however severe it becomes, will not make starvation typical in the United States. It is atypical now, it was atypical during the Great Depression, and it will continue to be atypical everywhere where people can trade freely and participate in economic exchange without government interference. The last mass famine in a country that should have had climate and agricultural advantages enough to prevent famine was in China, during the Great Leap Forward (around the time I was born). That famine had such a high death rate that the missing people of certain ages in certain regions were readily apparent when China conducted a census decades later in the 1980s.
Still working nights and weekends on http://www.genlighten.com, our "Etsy for Genealogy Document Retrieval" app.
Honestly, this is way over-dramatized.

>1. The Facebook upsides are much smaller than we think.

When I joined Facebook, back in the 'college-only' days, there weren't that many people there. It was about linking together with my dorm-mates, writing silly things on each other's walls (which were just overwriteable textareas), and generally wasting time. While the political motivations of the Facebook creators are debatable (I've heard bad things), on the simplest level, it's just a site where you post some information. They don't own your personal information. It's not a f trap. It's not the only one (Orkut, Myspace, Friendster, etc). At the end of the day, I don't care if an advertiser knows that I am friends with X and I like rock climbing. If they want to market pertinent offers to me, who knows? I might actually be interested.

This entire article is such a massive vortex of nothing ("Post stuff elsewhere, too") that it is evoking an emotional reaction from me. Who needs to be told this stuff?
Which is the normal job that the code gatekeepers do anyway. For any piece of code that wants to swim upstream to the main repository, it gets checked by the respective maintainers along the way.

Linus trusts these people to do their job, which sounds fair enough to me.
It might be a bit rough if you're looking in on the issue as an outsider, or if you've never been faced with the dilemma of how to license your product, but you should know that there is an entire spectrum of licenses that could fall under the umbrella of 'free software' i.e. BSD, MIT, and the GPL.

When Linus says the 'extremists' of the free software world, I think, he's mainly refering to where the FSF is taking the GPL[v3] and what this new version proibits.

For more see this post, http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white....
interestingly, I believe scheme was a failed[1] attempt at building OOP

[1] of course a closure is an object with exactly one method, apply
Your eyes have cells which contain pigments which react upon exposure to single photons. Single photon signal is really, really noisy though and so your eye requires thousands of such signals to combine in spatially and temporally relevant patterns before it sends a signal to your brain.
http://www.you-compete.com
Two words: business support.

If you purchase a Dell/HP/Lenovo support package, the support you'll get is excellent. e.g. same day, on-site, internationally.

Apple gives much better support by default; other manufactures offer teired levels of support, so if you're stuck in the default you get nothing - but if you pay a bit, you can get much better support than Apple offers.
Here is a simple one but sometimes overlooked by 1st timers:

Don't negotiate from a cost-plus perspective. Forget about how much time, $, resources you put into the project.

Think about the sale from a value-add perspective. How much additional value will this add to your potential buyer? try to understand his/her motivation to buy, what's the plan, etc. They see a way the site can generate additional revenue; it's your job to find out how much.

Also, don't throw out a number unless you have a reason to. Some will disagree with me but that's just my style.

Thirdly, look for comparable sites that have sold recently to get a very rough ballpark # and try to get additional bids.
I still love that motto.
Something as simple as this forum but separate from the news feed.

I find sites like PartnerUp are pretty dead, craigslist casts too wide a net that's very hit or miss, and tapping the personal network depends as much on timing (who's free) as having the right idea.

I feel this community is narrow/specialized enough to efficiently make some great contacts that can build some cool stuff.
Building a noise filter for Twitter: http://www.philtro.com
I agree with Linus, for the most part. Microsoft hatred has turned into a religion, and like any religion, it has its radicals.

However, it should be pointed out that this whole incident has more to do with Microsoft being forced to comply with the GPL to avoid being sued for GPL violation. Yeah, they GPL'd code, and turned it into a PR stunt - but they're not happy about it.

In other words - this incident proves that we need to continue to watch Microsoft like a hawk. Trust them like you would trust a trained tiger.
My 1st ever site! =)
http://www.ComoEstaEso.com

Check it out tomorrow during daylight!
PayPal Compares Its New Transaction Tool to the Electrical Outlet (rww/nytimes)
I just found http://www.squidoo.com/tribebuilding which seems related, but very generic.
Should Palm Have Re-Enabled iTunes Sync?
How robot drones revolutionized the face of warfare
I've been frustrated by the "reload to enable" change and a general sense of FireBug 1.4 freezing more often than 1.3.

This article moved me to downgrade back to 1.3: http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.3X/firebug-1.3X.4b2...
How much can they scale? And how much historical data would be stored? I am working on crunching huge weblogs right now and looks like they have already solved the problem (on a smaller scale? The website doesn't talk about traffic that they can handle)!
Huh. I first learned programming as an undergrad. Why do you think it is too late?

[Edit] Anyway, I think that depends on whether said CS major applied himself in college, don't you? I do have friends who graduated out of CS (well, actually we were in CE, but it's close enough) without knowing, or later forgetting, the difference between a class and a function (true story, that. he asked me that question about a year after working in the industry as a "consultant". the bugger works in a big IT consulting firm you've probably heard of). On the other hand, I discovered programming in university, got interested, and kept pushing. I don't claim to be a programming god or anything, but I do at least know how to do fizzbuzz. :)

It also depends on what sort of programming you're doing. If you're talking about typical web apps, then yes, I would agree with you that experience rules. Knowledge of the tools used in that trade are more important than anything a CS course could teach you. However, let's say you do crypto, or write 3D animation software, or any serious number-crunching/algorithmic app. That's an entirely different ball game. I'm sure there are hackers out there who are autodidacts in advanced algorithms, but CS training helps.

Should have made this shorter. In summary, it's never too late and formal CS training helps (if you have interest).
Personal opinion..... should be able to browse listings without being a member.
http://benchcoach.com
9 photons for 60% success rate of conscious perception http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...
I laughed when I saw the title...anyone remember this scene from "Trading Places"?

Fifty bucks? No, no, no. This is a Rouchefoucauld. The thinnest water-resistant watch in the world. Singularly unique, sculptured in design, hand-crafted in Switzerland, and water resistant to three atmospheres. This is the sports watch of the '80s. Six thousand, nine hundred and fifty five dollars retail! You got a receipt? Look, it tells time simultaneously in Monte Carlo, Beverly Hills, London, Paris, Rome, and Gstaad. In Philadelphia, it's worth 50 bucks.
Agreed ^ 2.
XUI | A simple javascript framework for building mobile web applications
Ask YC companies: What are you using to send emails?
Sending automated emails (verify email, share notices, etc.) is necessary in many apps today. Was wondering if you rolled something in-house or outsourcing to a provider.

Making sure emails are delivered into an inbox is also a pain with SFP, etc.

What are you guys using? Thanks in advance.
This week, at http://hubpages.com we rolled out a table capsule that fits in nicely with our hubtool, our user interface for designing wikipedia-like articles.
Interactive map of United States midcontinent onshore oil and natural gas wells: http://hydrocarbon.search.eser.org/

Used for identifying infill drilling locations.

Updated daily with new well locations.

Working on adding Canada, shale plays, and Gulf of Mexico offshore wells.

Using Memcached on Amazon EC2 + openlayers + Google WGS84 tiles.
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