skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
browser caution:
doesn't work with chrome or opera.

FF 3.5 ok. IE 8 ok.

I am watching "relation betn maths/physics" . This also answered one of the questions about learning math some days back. At about 13.50, He talks about how people try to avoid math(many questions I see here point to learning stuff bypassing math).

The language he uses is so crisp (with NY rich accent)is so 'listenable' unlike the slangy english nowadays. The subtitles are also cool.

I wait for comments from RiderOfGiraffes.
Viaweb.com yesterday
Viaweb.com today
i signed up for a free account and saw "email (username)" and immediately just put a username. after submitting the form i just got the plain text error "bad email" with no other explanation. you may want to make the error messages friendlier and show the user the form data again, not just a white page with "bad email".

also, after receiving the script code and then clicking through, i was prompted to login again. not sure if that's an error or intentional but it seemed weird.

i put the script code on a couple sites and will see what kind of data it produces over the next few days.

the new _vt_* cookies sent by your script caught me by surprise when loading my site. i guess _vt_* reminds me of the old microsoft frontpage extension junk (_vti_bin, etc.) which triggered some bad memories.
I desperately want to see benchmark comparisons with psyco. There are some applications where psyco does a great job and the second this beats that my excitement level will go through the roof.

As it stands, I'm already very excited about this.
The poor English is especially strange since they're in Sydney, Australia.

Other confidence-sappers:

- The company's address is residential. This not bad in itself, but the address leaves off the suburb name in an apparent attempt to look like they're in the CBD. The cover-up is not just worse than the crime, it is the crime!

- Appears to be using a generic CRM system; note the "powered by" lines everywhere, indicating it's probably not even registered.

- Said generic CRM is misconfigured, eg. offering language translations where no localisations have been entered

etc etc, much more I'm sure. I don't like small companies trying to look big. There is nothing wrong with small companies, in fact if anything I prefer them, but trying to look like something you're not - and not even doing it well! - is a big turn-off for me.
The current Palo Alto Hacker House — 3 YC, 2 Google, 1 Facebook, etc.. — will be looking for a couple of new housemates starting the first week in August.
Looks like a good article, too bad its being held hostage behind a wall.
can't think, Bill Gates will eat me
can't think, Bill Gates will eat me
can't think, Bill Gates will eat me
I'd like to see how many of these visitors who clicked through each link actually converted (as in, signed up as a follower).
Great signup flow, incredibly fast. Very happy I could setup my account without having to confirm the email.

Its running on a client's site now, looking forward to seeing some data.
Ask HN: How do you handle users that cancel their accounts?
As the title states, how do you deal with users that wish to cancel their account? For us it's a manual process so they email us, we immediately delete their account and say that we're sorry to see them leave and ask them why they're leaving (if they want to reply).

I'm interested in changing this process a bit and linking users to an exit survey (perhaps with the benefit of a 3 month free premium account in the event they wish to return at any moment?). What's best practice? What types of questions should I be asking in the survey, if that's the route to take?

I've searched around (and the Ask YC Archives) before posting this and didn't find anything relevant.

Thanks
The "appliance" term is used by Google to mean that the hardware lives with the company who's using it, but the users experience roughly the same thing they would if Google were hosting it.
It allows companies to keep all of their data stored on servers they own and control, while still using Google technology. A win for everyone, but it comes with a price tag.
Tell HN: Please Stop Breaking HTTP Clients
For whatever ungodly reason, the news.yc web server doesn't terminate header lines properly when sending a response, which happens to break any HTTP client that actually follows the RFC. Please see RFC 2616 section 3.7.1 and use \r\n as God intended.

This flexibility regarding
line breaks applies only to text media in the entity-body; a bare CR
or LF MUST NOT be substituted for CRLF within any of the HTTP control
structures (such as header fields and multipart boundaries).

Thank you!
For me signup failed. I get a near blank page (it says 'None'), however, the url shows "bad_email". I think it doesn't like email addresses of the form foo+bar@gmail.com - which is a valid email address and in common use, as in foobar+vistrac@gmail.com
It's impressive that they were able to beat 2009Q1 even by using LLVM naively. Looks like their first few releases are the software analog of Intel's tick-tock strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock), and it looks like we're in for a hell of a 'tock' in 3 months. Keep up the good work guys!
I agree, that's something we have to do. But it is a difficult choice as you can imagine. Thanks.
Xobni Decides To Start Making Money, Launches Premium Upgrades
Voted up. But a lot of homebrew webservers don't adhere and you'll just have to deal. In this case "God" is W3C, and not every decision they made was good, eg the "Referer" [sic] header. :)

[deleted grumble about writing production HTTP clients in 2009]
Should be required reading for all our representatives. Or, maybe even for all our citizens :)
how long are you guys looking to sign a lease for?
Number of followers is great for determining spamminess of an account, but mentioning the number of followers makes the message seem less personal. I would guess this would reduce its effectiveness, but I'm sure a quick test would provide harder evidence :)
Yes, I briefly messed around with an early build. It was fantastic. I won't say more as I haven't been following the publicity and so I don't know what is/isn't public info.

Disclaimer: I work for MS.
YouTube will cut loose IE6; Digg may, too
Oh, come on. You can't tell me you weren't freaked out when 1/6 of your monitors' real estate was taken over by his smiling visage next to Feynman's.
Xobni Turns On Revenue - Will Outlook Users Pay Up?
what kind of data portability features are there (I can't see any)? Would love to know my data can be ripped as .csv and taken with me should i choose to, especially on the paid plans.

cheers.
Maybe they can use http://alpha.crowdmind.com to facilitate the application review process. Going to release private group collaboration functionality soon, this could help when comparing the applications.
Easy way to run multiple django sites off same code-base
i agree with him - i can't code at all so i was forced to go this route to build some projects for my last position. i invested a lot of time in the specs to start with and as the contractor and i got more comfortable with what 'success looked like' it got a lot easier and soon he was suggesting improvements or implementing some features on the fly (you gotta earn that kind of trust). the key for me was to make sure each set of tasks was distinct and i could actually test something that works each week - ended up with 4-5 solid iterations before we finished and the weekly turnaround let me get a lot of good feedback from others.
Neither, I was reading through a Twisted ticket and it was mentioned that this server was breaking the new HTTP client (and why). I then confirmed this ridiculousness myself, and posted it.

I wrote one in 2008, though. Okay, most of one. But in my defense, no comparable [python] client existed at the time and I needed the functionality (synchronous requests were out of the question; a couple threaded clients were available but not robust or fast enough). As a general programmer rule, I tend to avoid writing code wherever possible :)
I wonder if anyone has tried to calculate how many bytes of data transfer have been saved from w3c's spelling of the word "referer".
'Repulsive' Side to Light Force Could Control Nanodevices
It's far from comprehensive; that's just a few people off the top of my head. We should make Free Software Hacker Trading Cards like baseball trading cards or something.
for corduroy (http://corduroysite.com/) when an administrator clicks on the cancel link, they are asked why (but can leave it blank) and after submitting the page, their site is marked inactive.

they are emailed a goodbye message and told that their site remains disabled but otherwise intact for 14 days. if an administrator logs in within 14 days, they are asked whether they want to reactivate the site, and if so, it's just enabled again. if the site is still inactive after 14 days, their database gets deleted from the server and from all backups.

the exit survey is helpful to find out if you can do something to help the user, which is also why deactivating the account but not immediately deleting it is helpful. give yourself some time to try to reach out to the user and help them while their data is still intact. however, a long survey may just further frustrate the user. and of course, always delete the user's account after a certain amount of time (i'm looking at you facebook) if not immediately.

offering incentives to canceling users always seemed shady to me. i remember calling comcast and trying to cancel and having all kinds of offers thrown at me. why do i have to threaten to cancel to get a lower rate?
This might sound dumb, but I always thought database tables used some sort of hash table like implementation with O(1) retrieve times on indexed columns. Don't b-tree indexes imply that we're looking at O(log(n)) retrieve times instead?

If so, why would database implementations make this tradeoff?

Two advantages I can think of: a b-tree offers very quick sorting (because data is already sorted). It is probably more efficient to grow a b-tree in place on disk without having to move too much data around too often.

While these two things matter, O(log(n)) vs. O(1) read performance is a big difference. And if I'm not mistaken, most databases ought to be read optimized to begin with.

Can someone enlighten me on the implementation considerations here?
Supplemental hints:

13)
A popular search engine: Google

A failed interface to an operating system: Microsoft Bob

Search on Google: Microsoft failed GUI

When the computer first boots up, you can log into its: BIOS

Search on Google Image: computer first boots up

Childhood toys for many geeks: Legos

Search on Google Image: "Childhood toys"
First link is: "Favorite childhood toys from the '80s" for Legos

16) Search on Google: display server configuration php

17) Search on Google: Smithsonian computer panel museum
I don't really see anybody needing to 'convey' software that uses lamson.

The AGPL solves that problem.
Summary: there are two camps of open source advocacy: those who state their position on matters of principle, and those who make their case based on promoting measurable quantities such as higher quality or more flexible software etc. Author believes the former is better because "Principles are based on a type of Utopianism; they are a statement of how we think things should be" whereas the latter argument is open to obvious, demonstrable cases where it is false.

While I have every sympathy for his intellectual position, as somebody who has had to make a business case for using open source software, I have found the vocal "efficiency" camp and its publicity invaluable when dealing with an audience that is sceptical towards matters of principles.... on principle. Yes, the superiority argument isn't always technically correct, but is certainly more appealing to certain classes of people.
Try http://twitcaps.com - More like 3 sleepless nights of work. But, it does support all major Twitter image hosts and allows searches / filters / captures / location aware, etc.
That's incorrect. In India, a small company office will have full time 'peon' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon . This person will be responsible for various office chores, the main one being to get 'tea' from nearby teashop. [Imagine having an office boy here who gets a Starbucks coffee for you when asked.] This happens because in India, concept of 'vending machine' is not very popular and labor is cheap. A lot of times, young kid from a poor family seem to take up this job. This has nothing whatsoever to do with caste. I am from a smaller city in India and I haven't seen any caste system discrimination in my 24 years of living there.
First, don't make it such a hassle. That just makes people think even less of you. If they have to go out of their way to cancel, their last memory of your service is going to be that it was a pain in the ass. Same goes for long surveys (a short set of two or three questions is ok).

Second, be wary of bribing them to stay. That can be great, or look desperate. Try to phrase it more like 'Would you be interested in trying a free month of premium service to see if that better suits your needs?'

Third, make it clear whether you're deleting or disabling their account. If you're deleting them and everything they've ever uploaded, specify that, and perhaps give them an opportunity to get their data off your server (export the account?).

If you just mark an account as 'disabled' in the database (because you need to refer to them for uploaded pictures, or whatever), ensure that you state this explicitly. If you need still to refer to their account, you should wipe all details you can from their account – birthday, phone number, favourite cheese, and so on – and specify this explicitly too. Ideally, you should wipe all the data and rename it to 'Anonymous 7120' or something.

A lot of information that you might ask in the survey you might want to be able to get from internal analytics anyway – such as how often they used the site, what features they used, and so on. You might ask them why they're leaving the site (rather than just ignoring it). Were they getting too many e-mails about your service or whatever? Was there some legal liability? Privacy issues? Trust?

Whatever the issue, ask if they're content to just fix it. If it's too many e-mails, offer a button that disables all e-mail notifications. If it's privacy issues, offer to erase their personally identifying information, etc.

Without knowing what your site is, it's hard to know what exactly to ask, but if you just put a little box saying 'We'd appreciate a few short words on why you're leaving us before you go', hopefully the answers will give you a better idea of what kind of probing questions to answer. Also put a checkbox asking if they wouldn't mind a follow-up conversation about the site by phone or e-mail, and if not, have someone talk to them to get a better idea of how they felt about the service.

Hope some of this helps.
After reading this, I heard the most baby-like cat meow coming from outside, but it turned out to actually be a baby.
The guy who created this site use to work with me and English is not his first language - that should explain the typos. The implementation definitely needs to get better, but, the concept is interesting and works well, and, that's why I posted it to HN.
"I will no longer be requiring your employment services?"

I don't think I've ever seen it put that way on a resignation letter. Seems quite conceited and self-aggrandising. Usually the aim of a resignation letter is to part on benevolent, cordial terms, which requires coming across at least somewhat deferentially and graciously -- not as a smug fuck.
oh man, check out that floating frog ;-) bring on the jellybird gel (extra points for naming that movie)
http://www.hfml.ru.nl/pics/Movies/frog.mpg
For starters, algorithms with O(1) performance can have large constant factors, and resizing the hash now and then can make the occasional operation disproportionately expensive.

Mainly, though, each b+-tree node is the same size as a disk I/O block. The disk is often the slowest part of the database, so making as few reads as possible will go a long way. If you can't work entirely in memory, that's the next best thing.
Fewer than that wasted by redundant CRLFs.
Ideally 6 months, but we need to talk to our landlord.
Instead, I think the next version of Google Analytics would put a lot of companies out of business
Found mine on http://snaptalent.com
djb's little creation needs more cooking, that much is for certain. Brand new all but unreviewed ECDH, stream and hash functions. The hash isn't even in the SHA-2 competition. It doesn't matter who djb thinks he is, using this library in its current form is irresponsible.
Contrarian, concise, convincing. Wonderful writing.
Type the DOS command: "ping pong.com" and enter the IP address digit...
Google CEO says he will "talk to Apple" about board conflict
endtwist, I have been exploring pricing options for my behavioral targeting and optimization startup (http://www.wingify.com/) and was wondering how did you arrive at this pricing. Did you test the pricing? Or did you took an idea from your competitors' pricing and upped it a little bit? I am curious because your competitors (ClickTale, CrazyEgg, etc.) have a more affordable pricing.
Microsoft-Yahoo Talks on Search Deal
What to look for when buying an electric cigarette
When looking to buy an electric cigarette, customers are faced with the 3-4 part e-cigarette and the 2 part e-cigarette. There are numerous of disadvantages with 3-4 piece design. First of all refilling is difficult and clumsy. You will have to get your fingers dirty when replacing the cartridges. As the three piece electronic cigarettes use the same filter, it is unhealthy and becomes a store house for bacteria.Over a period of time, the smoke volume decreases, thereby reducing the level of satisfaction
Pretty flash design for 1996!
Voted up, as a good example why it's better to build on top of existing software rather than reinvent the wheel (or in this case, Apache)
The page doesnt even load here, have tried with FF, Opera and IE (in Parallels)
If the registration just lapsed, you have two weeks to reactive it with your registrar. But it looks like Yahoo let it lapse a while ago and it's been a parking page for years.
Goodbye or not, I can't believe anyone would kiss IE6.
Manchester Web Design
Consider using something other than Lucida family for Windows visitors. It looks rather sloppy when rendered compared to Arial or other native OS fonts.
Fair enough. Make sure you impress on him the importance of correct language in his marketing material and implementation. If possible, get a native speaker to proofread it. That's what I would do if I was launching a product in Chinese.
Budget Hotels in Delhi
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Background images? A clock? Jump to a date? Sure, why not? I wish we could see some bigger innovations though. There's nothing wrong with Google Calendar but I'm always tempted by the idea there has to be a better way to approach it and do some of the grunt work of time organization and coordination for me. I guess we're just not there yet. Background images though... Hmm.
Google Voice Apps For Android And Blackberry Are Here
ROM - The Four Minute CrossTrainer - Justifying the purchase of a ROM machine
I don't see any conflict at all. Apple is not interested in that market. You won't be seeing any $1k+ laptops running ChromeOS. Android would have been a bigger conflict of interest but we've seen nothing to suggest it's true. I'd say Google may do a better job supporting the iPhone than they do Android at this point.
I might be interested as well, especially if it's only going to be a 6 month lease.

I'll send an email with my contact info so you guys can keep me in the loop.
"But why is vi brought up whenever Emacs is discussed?"

Because emacs users and vim users are disjoint, despite having almost everything else in common!
Honda Jazz
Somehow Honda seem to never do anything wrong, not in India. They have made a success of each and every car that they launch. Not necessarily a huge, riproaring success, but at the very least, a moderate success.
Whatever time you spend fiddling with your editor is time that you have not spent editing code. Over 10 years, it must add up.

What's dangerous is that the fiddling feels productive, even when you're just learning/making useless gimmicky features.
Salsa20 is an ECRYPT eSTREAM Phase 4 cipher, tied with Rabbit for the #1 software stream cipher. eSTREAM is to stream ciphers what what the AES competition was to block ciphers. The eSTREAM committee included Bart Preneel, Vincent Rijmen, and Matt Robshaw. If the thing you're reacting to is that NaCl doesn't use AES, note that the peer review Salsa20 got was substantial.

Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) isn't "all but unreviewed". ECDH is a NIST standard. Curve25519 is just an implementation of ECDH over a set of parameters that admits to especially fast implementation.

The hash function in NaCl is SHA-512.

Poly1305 isn't a hash function. It's a polynomial MAC, similar to what's used in the NIST standard GCM. If that's what you were referring to as "the hash function that isn't even in the SHA-2 competition", note that none of the NIST authenticated encryption modes use (comparatively slow) generic hash function constructions like HMAC, and none of the MAC functions they do use (OMAC, CBC-MAC, GCM's poly eval) have been entered, like apples, into SHA-2's orange competition.

I don't know who you think Daniel J. Bernstein is, but the short answer is: extremely reputable cryptographic researcher.

The sad thing is, your core argument --- that it would be "safer" to use NaCl using the NIST curves and AES --- is valid, and would have been informative if you hadn't chosen to phrase it in such a dismissive way. As it stands, I'm left thinking you don't know what you're talking about and just stumbled on this critique, particularly as your professional background contains basically no crypto or security.

Either way, you are almost certainly better off using NaCl with DJB's bespoke algorithms than you are trying to patch AES, HMAC-256, and RSA together using OpenSSL. We break actual peer-reviewed cryptographic algorithms in the field during penetration tests basically never. We break homebrew AES and RSA constructions about once a month.
A hash table isn't much use for queries that return multiple rows, or use aggregate functions. (SELECT avg(price) FROM sales WHERE date_trunc('month', timestamp) = '2009-06-01').

Not only can a b-tree locate the edges of such a range, but if you're accessing k rows from an n-row table, your index access time is O(k + log(n)) with k quickly becoming the dominant factor.

Even when you're accessing one row per query, these queries will often be favouring a particular cluster of row, rather than being perfectly evenly distributed over the table. In such cases a b-tree will provide better locality of reference; you'll hit cached data in memory rather than disk far more often.
Considering A Site Redesign? 5 Tips To Get You Focused
Apache is probably the worst example you could have possibly picked, it's such a dog.
I had the same problem a while ago and ended up writing a patch to make PHP's HTTP library more flexible:

http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=15223
Data point: I can't stand gnus. It was a paon to config, and I never got RSS working. (mh-e is nice, though.)

Building a mail system into a single-threaded text editor seems a bit silly to me...
There's a lot of answers for this, but a simple one is that C gives you (much more) control over the memory hierarchy. A carefully written C program can, for instance, keep things most in or out of cache. High-level languages also abstract bignum math, which in number-theoretic crypto is a source of timing channels.