skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given that Apple only supports 1 carrier in the US, I think 10.8% of the smart-phone market is a great start. I know a lot of people that would love to buy an iPhone if only it supported T-Mobile (without unlocking) or Verizon/Sprint.

By the way, do you happen to have a link for those market share numbers?
There is a practical reason for this depending on your algorithm. In mine it was much faster to change the last 5 characters instead of changing the entire string. I saw about a 50% performance improvement by creating a fixed set of 12 words, and altering the last 5 characters. Then updating the 12 words when necessary.
JSRoll: Community Driven JavaScript News
I read a number of blogs. The best ones focus on specific niches but often use those niches to explore the wider world. For example, Marginal Revolution at http://www.marginal revolution.com is nominally an economics blog, but it also discusses foreign travel, ethnic cuisine, books, and more. The blogs I contribute to try to follow the same general principle: The Story's Story at http://jseliger.com focuses on books (except for the present top post, which is about keyboards—sometimes exceptions are interesting) and Grant Writing Confidential at http://blog.seliger.com . The latter is part of my family's business and so has a purpose beyond random musings.

If you're thinking about writing a blog, read Penelope Trunk's comments: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/penelopes-guide-to-blogging/ which are invaluable if not always accurate. In addition, I wrote a post called "You’re Not Going to be a Professional Blogger, Regardless of What the Wall Street Journal Tells You" that got slashdotted and ought to dissuade you from the idea you're going to make money directly at it: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be-a-p... .

"Without a purpose for writing, though, I don't see how to even try writing a blog. Any suggestions?"

As others have said, don't write a blog if you don't have a purpose. Your purpose should come from something you care about deeply enough to know something about that you'd like to transmit to others: in my case, that means books, chiefly, but also grant writing. For many HN readers, it probably means programming. Remember too that the deep knowledge/writing/transmission process isn't linear, but recursive: I've probably learned more about books by trying to sort my ideas about them out in a logical, rational way than I would if I just read a lot (this, incidentally, is why good schools require you to write a lot: writing forces you to embellish the ideas you do have and often to come up with ideas you didn't have previously).
Joe Budden Kills Method Man/ Wu-Tang Beef | Hip Hop MVP
Well I haven't been around that long so let's see if I can pass the test.

why one is sometimes unable to reply to a comment

There is a cooling off period when there is vigorous activity on a subthread to avoid flame wars. I think this is a recent change.

"the title of a submission is often changed arbitrarily"

The guidelines are pretty clear on this one: "You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

"down- or up-voting is sometimes disabled"

I've never seen that. Downvoting for comments is only available to logged in accounts with a karma of 500 I think, and not for stories.

And why does a thread sometimes turn up locked, with no explanation Is HN now Wikipedia?

I don't know what the dead-ing mechanism is, but it certainly not Wikipedia - HN is a private site and I expect the editors to do what they like.

[Edit: Thanks to rms and tokenadult for the corrections below]
My entry (rkneufeld) is cut off at the end. Actual suffix is: "3:OID". This moved me from 34 to 68 :( . Just thought you might like to know
Startup Law 101 - Legal tips for setting up your startup
> I think this is a recent change.

It is - I think it's one of the best (the algorithm apparently scales too - so longer waits the deeper the thread). it's stopped me posting a rash response once or twice.
Writing guest entries on popular blogs is actually a good way to promote your own blog.
You can't downvote replies to your own comments or root comments on a thread you submit.
Adobe’s Mobile Flash to get accelerometer, multi-touch support in 2010
> This is not a good reason to start a blog :-)

I dont know - we dont really have enough data about his friends and why they think this.

It could be good advice. For example if I was considered expert and insightful on, say, a security forum my friends there might suggest I start to put some of it in a blog for a wider audience :)

To the OP: It really depends how good a writer you are and what sort of topics you can write about. If your engaging to read then your audience might range across a number of sources.

Yes, people do generally read a small set of core blogs - but we also sit and read interesting stuff that goes by our radar. You might not get people checking your site every day but if they can find good content on there once or twice a fortnight (say) they might look out for your links on HN et all. That, to me, is as good a readership as any :)

(if you in it to make money though that's a different matter)
My thought exactly. I came back here to check the comments in case someone explained it more clearly...
I have recently begun a similar project: I work for a private bank and am rebuilding our client website. The main system (which is used internally for booking transactions and managing portfolios etc.) runs on an Oracle DBMS, so it isn't really legacy, but it does have a goulash data schema that is convoluted and slow. I'm using Rails for the site, which of course assumes certain conventions, but I've actually found it easy to loosely couple the site to the old system (by using views to extract the relevant data plus a little extra Ruby code). Most people in my dept haven't even heard of RoR but I've already had a positive reaction to the proof of concept which blows the old site out of the water and was built in less than a week.

The UI advice in the article hits the nail on the head. When dealing with legacy systems, smart use of aggressive caching and AJAX (loading icons etc.) can help improve user experience without any changes to the underlying system.
Except that Michelle Malkin and LiberalOasis aren't sources of news -- they're commentary. And the editorial pages of traditional papers are very clearly biased in one direction or another, and that bias is obvious to anyone who reads them.

Where there exists a problem is when blogs with a clear bias try to report news, and pollute that reportage with their opinions while claiming to their readers to be covering things objectively.
This is a good reason to open it.
With an open wifi there is no good case that it was you.
With a secured wifi - you simply have to convince an 80year old judge and a jury of sheep shearers of the mechanisms of an attack on a WEP secured link.
Don't blog about your life, blog about what you've learned. I blog about interesting code and languages that I come across. I like writing how-tos on my blog because often I will later use my own how-to to do something I had forgotten down the line. It's all a matter of personal preference, but blog about something that you find interesting.
Very nice indeed, but you can do it in binary, where the series is

0.01 + 0.0001 + 0.000001 + ... = 0.010101010101...

Multiplying the right hand side by 2 gives

0.101010101010...

0.010101010101...
+ 0.101010101010...
-------------------
0.111111111111... = 1 = 11*0.010101010101...
Start a blog on a subscription basis. Your friends can pay up their subscription and if you hit some threshold, then you start it. The old ... let them put their money on the table gambit. Other than that, I agree with the other comments. Blogging is something that you should do if you're prepared to do it with no reward.
Probably. We're going to have to face this eventually. Plus any sufficiently rich market probably has room for several permutations.
I use Prototype and have never really looked into JQuery.

I wouldn't recommend Prototype (shock horror). I use it for familiarity and because my JS needs are minimal at best - but it's got lots of niggly shortcomings.
I didn't read it as self-glamorization. The writing was satirical, but not narcissistic in my opinion. If this article was supposed to describe their product, your concern over its content is valid. It seemed to be more about recounting their story rather than the product, which isn't inherently bad.
Why can't everyone just use the best tool for the job and be done with it?
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/you-should-write-blogs

[It is also a good example in support of at least one of the points that it itself makes]
Write the equation that defines "the national interest".

The economy is an extremely complex system. This guy wants to fix a component of that very complex, highly-inter-related system with a verbal argument. Hand-waving. No testing of the law, which he doesn't specify. No testing of the implementation mechanism, a gov bureaucracy, which we know to be extremely un-reliable, and to be so complex a subsystem as to have emergent properties which often produce perverse effects.

This has as much chance of making the world a better place as a random change to source code in the linux kernel.
If you want to go back to the moon:

1. Give the terrorists a space Program. We didn't go to the moon because we thought it'd be neat up there, we went to beat the Soviet's asses. That's why Americans were interested then, that's why they'd be interested now.

2. Make gains clearly applicable to world power. Gee oh I wonder why the US was so willing to invest millions and millions into rockets. Might it have something to do with the fact that they used the same technology to give themselves the ability to put a Nuke in striking distance of anything on the planet? The government only gave a crap about the Moon because it pleased the people and because it made their death-weapons possible.

People are no dumber now than they were then. In fact, people are loads smarter. Look at the devices they use on a daily basis!

Why is there some need to lament the state of humanity at every turn? Guys, it's not really that bad. Everything's going to be OK
I find it a bit annoying (sometimes there is a rapid-fire good debate) but I can sure live with it if it really helps the S/N of the site. I concede there is a certain logic in "If you can't wait a few minutes to say something maybe you don't need to say it that badly".
Apologies, I can see the link I posted has absolutely no relevance to the context in which routers are discussed in the article.
There are four equal (modulo rotation) parts:
three share a corner with the original triangle and a fourth in the middle does not share a corner with the original triangle.
The one in the middle is highlighted grey as 'the third', the two triangle parts sharing the lower left and lower right corner of the original triangle are ignored and the triangle sharing the top corner of the original triangle is segmented further
I don't know what the dead-ing mechanism is

Some submissions are autokilled because they are links to sites on the list of banned sites.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044

Some submissions are autokilled after they have been flagged by a sufficient number of users.

Some submissions are manually killed by curators for the usual reasons every public website needs curators.
Right now you're showing duplicate entries (the same entry of value 31 is showing from two people)
That whole text is beautifully information-free.
Indeed, I found it highly fascinating when it was published that introverts and extroverts differ in some path-finding on ones brain.
It just baffles me: some neurons are routed a bit different, and you turn from a geek who is happy to work on some complicated problem into a party going person who is depressed once there are less than 5 people around him (and vice versa)
When I first saw this post I thought "Another clueless Newbie", but I checked, and it isn't. That gave me pause for thought.

Most of these questions are answered in the FAQ, or turn up sufficiently often that I would expect a casual reader to know them. Clearly I'm wrong.

So this goes for other sites as well: How can you arrange information such as this, so that both new and experienced users can find it easily, instead of being driven to ask questions?

Can we create a really useful question answering system of which questions like this can be asked, and which mines a database for the answers?

There's a start-up waiting to happen ...
Roflol.

Short, probably flippant-sounding description: I have discovered The Cure for cystic fibrosis. And it is a videogame!

(Actually it's a lifestyle. But mere words have so far proven wholly unable to convey the necessary paradigm shift. So I need a simulation -- aka a computer game. Probably web-based, in part so that advertising can generate revenue since the only viable price point is probably "Free". But also in hopes of generating an online community...etc.)

The roughly $3B is medical expenses spent on roughly 30,000 people. Getting well doesn't happen overnight. It's taken me over eight years to get off all medication. (I am currently drug free for the first time in nearly 9 years, as of early June.) So I have zero reason to believe that I can tap directly into the billions spent annually on drugs, doctors and hospitalizations. Insurance won't pay for the supplements or dietary and lifestyle changes that have allowed me to get well (and they certainly won't pay for a "game").

And the list of issues goes on.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming. Thanks for the feedback. :-D (Sincere thanks. Scout's honor...so to speak.)
along the same lines, they should also recover completely the unjustified money spent by politicians/bureaucrats - like the money that gov sanford spent on his Argentina visit. Other examples could include decorating their offices beyond reason etc.
For instance, in Common Lisp, you could write your own web framework and fix all those mistakes they made in the ~100 man years of Rails development.

Then, you could start working on your own versions of gems, plugins, and the like.

And after you get done with reimplementing the ecosystem, you can crank out a bank website in, I don't know, a weekend or so.
The average American home now have 3 TVs
That's because somebody just copied and pasted somebody else's entry. The system is working as intended. I'm sure Engineyard will catch it in their judging (or so I hope).
He's trying to say that Microsoft refused to embrace the internet because it was something that they had no control over (instead, Microsoft planned to launch their own closed online service in 1995 called Marvel), and as a result they fell far behind in the internet space.

He goes on to make a comparison to Twitter, and how they are concerned that if they make the service too open, then developers might create something that competes with the service or renders it obsolete. And he's saying that reluctance to embrace the openness of the internet will result in failure in the same manner that it did for Microsoft.

(not that I agree with this piece; this is just my interpretation)
It's more hassle to support and maintain. Our IT department is already stretched, and that would be one more thing to add to the load.
Apple acknowledges AppStore's "race to bottom", working on improvements.
One problem I see with such discussion is the lack of distinction between 'there is a cause for pain in the hand' and 'the brain senses pain in the hand'.
One can see this nicely if you simply think of pain as light, the pain sensors as light sensors and the brain as a microprocessor, connected to the sensors. Certainly, if light is there, then the sensors will sense light, and thus, the two statements are equal in this case.
However, if the sensor only senses light, one strictly does not know if there is light or not, as the sensor might malfunction.

If one realizes this distinction between the existance of a state and the recognition of a state, things grow much clearer and one does realize that whatever is going on, one must consider a malfunction of the brain and nerves.
Me too, but we're in the minority.
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/07/blue-sky-star...
Simple non-programmer explanation of REST architecture
this was enough for me to appreciate why everyone was shoving it in their titles...
Apologies. I have corrected it.
I understand what you're trying to do, and testing this is important, but I think everyone would be a bit concerned about sending emails which will reveal their email addresses.

Perhaps you could find a more focused user community to test you service?
I’m part of the 2% of Americans that doesn’t own a TV. I haven’t had one for 7 months now and I don’t miss it.

I just can't help but think of:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/26/28-not-having-a-t... every time I read that. I gotta admit, I'm 100% guilty of the same, but doesn't mean I can't smile every time I come across it.
Then, I'm afraid, you're missing the point of the paradox. There are a few stories (improperly called "paradoxes") attributed to Zeno: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

You're probably thinking of The Dichotomy. This story points out that matter must not be infinitely divisible. The paired story, The Arrow, shows that a universe of finite, indivisible pieces is also impossible. Thus, Zeno's paradox.

Further, very interesting reading:
http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s3-07/3-07.htm

Math just gave us a way of coming up with the obvious answer, it does not describe the nature of the universe, which is what the philosophy was attempting.
Announcing Google Code Jam 2009
Sorry to append the # sign, but the same URL was posted for the 2008 contest last year.
I write a blog that's precisely of the sort that you think can't be interesting to others. Random thoughts about anything that interests me; rants, arguments, (rarely) mini-essays on anything in a long list of my interests. Very eclectic.

It's extremely popular, with readership in five figures, and typically more than a hundred daily comments on various posts. One of the best things about it is that it has many readers who are smarter than me, and/or more knowledgeable than me on just about any given topic I'm interested in. I've made a few really good friends and a lot of friendly acquaintances through the blog, all over the world.

Maybe my case is a rare exception; that wouldn't surprise me. I've tried, for example, to write the same kind of eclectic random-thoughts blog in English -- my primary blog is in Russian -- for a few years, and never got more than 100-200 readers. Maybe I wasn't giving it enough attention (it's semi-dormant now, though I'm trying to find tuits to revive it), or maybe in English, a non-specialized blog has a harder time attracting attention. Or maybe much of it is random. Among the blogs I read (40+ in English, a few hundreds in Russian), most widely-read ones are either by famous people or specialized to some topic; but there are some exceptions like me.
I think it's a walled garden argument. Twitter wants to control the firehose, which is like the wall?
It would be nice if it did more introspection. I have a root projects directory (~/workspace) and it'd be nice if I could specify that root then try like :Proj ticketstumbler and just have it figure out from the directory name what I want. The projects file could be used to override defaults, so if I specify the same project in that file, it uses that config.

Also, why make me put quotes around the project name?
It's poor man's Vertica. Mostly good for analytics workloads.

It's quite strange that they didn't reference Bigtable paper at all, while saying "to the best of our knowledge, there exists no published deployment of a parallel database with nodes numbering into the thousands". Google had a dozen bigtable clusters with more than 500 nodes and at least one cluster with a few thousand nodes (for the main crawl db), more than 3 years ago.
I think it has something to do with the Confucian formalities. This is true of Taiwan and Singapore as well. Though ironically enough mainland China is probably the least Confucian of the bunch as a result of Communism.

I've read a lot about mainland Chinese office workers quitting Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Singaporean companies because of the "attitudes" and the office culture their superiors impose on them.

Foxconn is a Taiwanese company, so I'd expect some extra formalities involved in the offices. Interestingly enough, since the mainland companies are eager to emulate foreign corporate cultures, a good portions of them are adopting the formalities from its Asian neighbors. Though to balance things out many companies are also going for the more casual tones of western firms. It'd be interesting to see how it'll work out.

Assembly line workers are a different story. They are pretty much all treated like crap, since they are considered a lower social class because of their rural births and the lack of legal permits (and thus forfeiting many rights) to live in the cities. This is the major source of social unrest in China, it's mostly unreported in the west, and it's a much greater threat to the government than all the ethnic conflicts you hear in the media.
Indeed. It did contain a non sequitur statement or two. I was stating opinion, not conducting a logical proof where every statement logically implies every other. Hence the lack of footnotes, etc. Were I trying to set forth evidence, my post would have been very long.

This isn't the sort of thing you can find out by armchair reasoning, as you might be implying. You have to actually look at the evidence. Luckily, there are piles and piles, and it's nearly all on my side.
I like this observation:

[The Internet] doesn't employ any engineers, and when they leave one company to work for another they still work for the Internet.

This perspective also makes work histories much more straightforward. For example, mine becomes:

WORK HISTORY

2003-2009 Internet, San Francisco, CA
2000-2003 Internet, San Francisco, CA
1999-2000 Internet, Austin, TX/Sunnyvale, CA
1996-1999 Internet, Austin, TX
1995-1996 Internet, Austin, TX
1993-1995 Internet, Sunnyvale, CA

I may have to get business cards made up.
Boycotting China wholesale is counter productive if you want to achieve better working conditions for Chinese workers.
What's the URL of your blog? A friend of mine can translate. I'd like to see how you make this work.
one step removed from porn

Okay, I have to ask - what do you mean by this? Are you talking about supposedly general-purpose products whose main revenue-generating usage is in fact pornographic? Or products that operate elsewhere in some supply chain but don't actually have direct contact with the naked boys and girls?

Could you give a couple of examples, perhaps?
Thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of introspecting the directory names...I'll see if I can work that in there.

You have to put quotes because otherwise Vim complains about using undefined symbols (I don't plan on using the command interface in the long run; probably something more like what MiniBufExplorer does, or even FuzzyFileFinder's hack of the completion system). I agree that it's clumsy, but the command interface is limited, and can only accept paths with quotes omitted.
I subscribe to many blogs that cover my technical interests and a few personal ones. I avoid blogs with adverts or that are set up to make money. I generally use an RSS reader to follow these blogs (and Twitter and other sources).
747!?!? Try 707. All of Boeing's commercial airframe have been self-funded since before Airbus existed. There may be internal cross-subsidy from other defense projects (e.g. borrowing to develop A by using the federal funding of B as a loan guarantee) but no Boeing airframe you can buy today was started or funded as a DoD project.