skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can (and should) also verify your name and address with the system (it then shows on your profile that your name and address are verified) and people can vouch for each other.

When you look for a host, you would normally read their profile and look a their pictures to try and get an idea on the kind of person they may be. You check if they're verified and how many people vouched for them. Low numbers and not being verified may be enough reason to choose someone else, especially if traveling alone, though personally, everyone has to start somewhere, so if Im in a group, I don't care so much. People can meet couchsurfers for drinks or at events anyway as a way to "break in". Finally, I'd check the comments people left. Most people who read comments take negative comments pretty seriously, though obviously some people don't bother.

Over all, I think this works pretty well. The biggest danger would be to people who are using couchsurfing purely to get free accommodation, since they're unlikely to put as much effort into checking people out beforehand. Personally, I don't bother, unless I'm being hosted or they're hosting me - if its for a meeting or a drink, then I'll see what they're like when I meet them.

Obviously this system leaves plenty of room for problems.. Sadly its not too hard to misrepresent yourself. It seems extremely rare though, luckily.

Personally, I've never had ANY problems of any kind and ave not met any couchsurfers who have had any either. It does work - usually.
I am the first to bash Microsoft when they deserve it, but I think that we should also give credit when due. IE 5 was the most standard compliant browser on its time, and yes, Microsoft did invented AJAX. So, we could thank them for that.
Nothing that cool would ever happen in real life.

Perhaps not exactly like that. But in some cities, Amazon offers same-day delivery that is like $7 for Prime customers. (Sadly, not Chicago.) Order your new computer in the morning, it shows up at your office / home in the afternoon. Pretty convenient. No tubes required.
Hmmm... Okay, you're right.

It's just funny that if they said "please tell us a name you'd like to use to come back to these results later" then it probably wouldn't have been a big deal at all.
Instead of blocking the search you should let the search happens and show in some place, please create a user for have access to the features X, Y and Z, but stopping the user when they click in "run voltmeter" doesn't do a good impression.
> with SVG, Canvas, Smil, HTML 5, Video, and CSS3

The elephant in the room is that Javascript is just not a good language to develop in, most especially for the kind of culture and processes that Flash developers use. It is difficult to maintain, it plays terribly when different people with different coding styles interact, and most of all it is extremely browser dependent, in terms of the behaviour you can expect to see, and equally importantly for the dramatic differences in performance you get. What do all Javascript libraries have in common? They all provide a twisty nightmare of little passages when you try to combine more than one with all of the interactions between global variables and dynamic operations.

Having seen the work process that Flash developers use, I wonder why anyone can even begin to imagine that some offspring of HTML and Javascript can ever even begin to make inroads there.
Great idea and these guys have taken it pretty far already: http://www.cargocap.com/

In a couple of decades, our kids will be asking us: "... and you had heavy trucks deliver goods within the city? Nasty."
People that have generally proven over time to be reliable and have received the appropriate licenses for operating a hotel. It's more than just a matter of degree.
I think if it is your first time joining a startup, then go for it. The experience that you'll get is extremely valuable.
And if it is not the first time, then most likely you already know what to do...
They could offer a free one time snapshot and then require registration/fees to see changes over time or to get recommendations or something.
Forget Starbucks, work at the library instead
Would you use it? If the answer is no then I would pass.
Greenspun had a good post related to this:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/08/11/comfortable-wi...

I once lost out on a job because of my Calculus grade in college.
You're also exchanging links with blogs that do the same thing you're writing against. You shouldn't promote those blogs if you feel so strongly against the practice. That being said, I agree with you that any post collecting a bunch of links is a disgusting practice.
After the initial bait-and-switch annoyance, the app looks great, and it generated some very useful information. Now I need to look into improving my site's rating. :)

I'm definitely going to consider signing up for a pro account as you roll out additional features. I think if you fix that one minor UX problem this could be a very useful tool.
It doesn't look like this generalizes. It's true for young black males at low levels of math education based on this study, but there's nothing to suggest anything more than that. I have a math degree and I wish everybody would take more math, but I don't think there's much causality between taking math and earning more at higher levels of math education. There certainly may be correlation though.
Let me know when I can trade in my Stack Overflow karma for cash.
Came here to say that. If I really don't care about the subject of the potential fight I just laugh at the person asking the question. "You didn't remember to turn on the dishwasher after you put the dishes in! Do you do this on purpose?!" me: "hahahah". Done.
shrug

They're not all the same, but they're all basically true.

If you were to assign five writers to cover a totally non-political event, you are still going to get five different characterizations of people at the event. I don't think this is evidence of anything evil.

It's a bit like complaining about different movie reviewers with conflicting accounts of the same movie.

I'm not denying that news outlets have institutional biases that sometimes comes out in the writing, but this seems like an especially mild case.
We used Objective-C because it has a very simple and efficient threading model, and we're on a tight schedule. Python wasn't fast enough, coding threads in C or C++ would take a few hours longer than we had, so we used Objective-C.

You're absolutely right about standard benchmarks. We haven't engineered our benchmarking tools to make RethinkDB look good, we simply wrote code to run the most obvious operations - as many inserts as possible, as many selects as possible, etc. We will be moving to more commonly accepted benchmarks (such as TPC and iiBench) soon, but in the meantime it helps to have a simple benchmarking tool that shows off what RethinkDB can do on common workloads.
this will be great as soon as hosting providers give the option of "disk space using SSD". Until then, a solution like this binds you to buying your own servers. Maybe I'm misreading their web site, but they do list SSD as their first "feature".
"Donated rice comes from the advertisements from sponsors, therefore abuse of scripts will likely lead to catastrophe, as advertisers prefer that actual people view their advertisments. Knowing the existence of the bots, FreeRice updated their FAQ explaining the potential damage of botting"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeRice
You missed a word, which I added in italics:

"There is too much pre-existing infrastructure underground to automate it completely in a cost-efficient way today."

I've said on HN a couple of times that robotics work is going to radically affect society, and this is the sort of thing I'm thinking of. If we had real robots that could be turned loose with nothing more than a layout of the desired network and the necessary resources, and could intelligently deal with most blockages and intelligently call in human help when needed (and only when needed), then the cost equation of this idea changes a lot. (Also, robots to do a lot of basic maintenance without human intervention are probably necessary.)

Right now, it's a total pipe dream. Perhaps when we get such robots, it'll be more cost-effective to do something else instead, like an above-ground robotic bucket brigade for item deliveries. Or robotic delivery vehicles. But the tunnel approach may turn out to be feasible. (Or, more likely, a bucket brigade in some places, tunnels in others, and robotic drivers in yet others, where each makes most sense, freely intermixing delivery styles as needed.) So, bear in mind it is not that I am predicting specific results like "tubes in the ground", but that robots are going to radically change the cost side of many cost/benefit analyses.
Ok, kind of a valid point.

However, for our enterprise SaaS application, we have standardize on JQuery, and with a set of best practices, we have a very strong and powerful application model on top of JS/DOM. The dynamic nature of the Web could be a unique asset to build large enterprise application.

But, yes, I would also agree that Javascript/DOM gives many ropes to people to hang themselves. However, we should not blame the ropes if they do.
It is Article 1, Section 10 that is of interest because it expressly forbids states from coining money or emitting bill of credit.

"Section. 10. No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility."
Win a Native Instruments Audio 2 DJ, 4 Channel, USB 2.0 Interface
I fail to see your point. I assume you feel that since the soldier is not physically inconvenienced or in personal danger, that he is more likely to make inappropriate kill decisions. In my opinion, exhaustion and fear are the enemies of good decision making. Your guy with the can of coke doesn't fire blindly because he's terrified. He doesn't fire on his own men because he's too tired to see they're friendly.

Whether he "gets off" on firing on random targets, is a problem with the man, not the technology. Such a man would be a menace anywhere he was, even without the can of coke.
Errored for me on my first try (just a simple 500 in an alert box, that's it)... So I tried a different URL and it yelled at me about upgrading to get 'more reports per day' -- I haven't even got one yet!

:/
I don't think it's about math degree levels of math education. it's about the fact that all the highest earning majors with the exception of maybe law require at least the calculus series.
Solid-State Drives Get Warmer Reception From Businesses
Naturally, because the media just could not control themselves to mention that this man is Moroccan, even though that has fairly little to do with what happened.

There are two possible angles to their motivation to mention this:

- this happened in Britain, but it involved two foreigners, it has nothing to do with 'us'

- Moroccans are all the same, here is the proof

It is interesting to note that some newspapers carefully elided this fact but published the rest of the story unchanged.

Whether or not he is muslim is cause for debate, nowhere does it say so. But hey, when you're inciting racial hatred facts are just so inconvenient.
I'm curious. This is an interesting new company, and I'd like to follow it. I'm very curious about the tools you use.

What is particularly efficient about the threading model? I know very little about Objective-C. Are you guys are very comfortable with it? Does someone writes Mac application there?
I can't help but feel that this idea misses the point of why Twitter was so successful - far more than the notion of convincing all those millions of users to start their own blogs and use Google Reader. The sheer simplicity of it all lowers the barriers to entry, something that asking people to start a wordpress blog or whatever else would never capture.
Yep, quite different than the impression given by the whole patent troll phenomenon.

Imagine if this under dog hadn't gone through so much trouble. The software landscape would be quite different now.
"This is the sort of question you might ask after trying to actually verify his supposed MS in Information Technology from the University of Maryland, College Park campus. The registrar has no record of it.

"I have already queried the White House concerning this and have heard nothing back."

Wow. This looks like a total muff in checking the background of quite an important (supposedly) government official. How many more errors of background checking like that have happened?
It's a big difference putting your trust in a licensed operator (read: Hotel) versus some stranger with an air mattress in their living room.

And nobody said a thing about making anything illegal. Straw man much?
Checking e-mail before your morning coffee? You're not alone
Yeah, people thought that solving world problems were that easy? Really?

"It's easy, I'll just write a perl script solving world hunger!"
So what are the numbers for selects while writes are happening? It's really suspicious to show 'selects with no writers.' In terms of transparency, it's nice to have benchmarks that don't show you winning everything (makes me trust that you actually know what you're doing, rather than are just optimizing a few benchmark-able cases).

Also, include the actual queries you are executing. Inserting into 2 columns with only a primary key index is a completely different beast than 30 columns with uniq key constraints and multiple multi-key indexes.
Boxee Raises Another $6 Million for Assault on Big Media
You're trusting people who are licensed, bonded and insured versus some schlep with space in his living room. The matter of degree here is gargantuan.
Collectibles remain alive and well, but once you recontextualize yourself and think of the "child-collectible" market as a whole, it's hard to imagine sports cards as anything but a very small niche in that larger market. It takes an awful lot of love for baseball to prefer a pack of baseball cards to a pack of Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I'm sure some kids will get there, but probably not enough to keep an industry afloat.
> Its mature enough to be used for real projects and its a lot nicer and whole lot more powerful than Java.

Sure, but that's not exactly saying a lot.
But the underlying metric that actually matters, the number of users converted, did actually improve by 21.1%.

I think it's just a matter of using confusing labels to refer to the percentages/improvements.

In other words, you don't really care about the second derivative (the rate at which the conversion rate) is improving as much as you care about the initial rate.
Oh the irony!

They've been using IE6 as the anchor that doesn't let the web sail away and now they drop it like a dead weight to the bottom of the ocean just to push their agenda forward and get an early advantage over office suites online.

But you know what? we've been rowing the oars without their help pushing that heavy anchor with us as we move forward.
Isn't that "fertilizer"?
Oh boy... On a normal day saying bad things about Microsoft is a sure way to get downvoted. Today, when I want to get a couple down-votes to reach a 1337-point karma, I get upvoted...

Go figure...
Examples of Crowdfunding Initiatives
Ridiculous how the 'rich world' is playing with lives, food and life...
More than unoriginal blogs, I hate blogs that have a list of a billion ads across the top -- particularly when more than half of them are empty squares that just say "advertise here." If you can't sell ad spots, at least don't show them to me.
Science Fiction Authors in their Creative Spaces
I'm not sure about sourcing, but it was recently used on the Stack Overflow podcast in Jeff and Joel's discussion of the profitability of creating plug-ins for another piece of software. Other considerations aside, one of the greatest threats to stability was if you created something so useful to the general userbase of the parent application, that the producers of the parent application would roll that up into the next version of their software, thereby rendering your cash cow redundant, e.g. a spell-checker for Firefox.

Joel likened this to snatching nickel from in front of an oncoming steamroller.
My CSS3 Wish List ~ C for Coding
> Military Brass will argue that it makes war safer. That's a fucking insane statement to make.

No, really, it isn't. To wish for the maximal trauma of soldiers is, on the other hand.

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."

Then you can go on the debate war it self -- but there are just and necessary wars. Had it not been for the allied forces to come to that conclusion 65 years ago, I'd be speaking German and be forbidden to marry anyone outside my pure, arian race. I'm pretty thankful that someone didn't make the argument then, that it is insane to make war safer by having soldiers advance inside armoured vehicles.
It’s how you deal with failure that determines how you achieve success
I don't agree; as the article mentions, GFS is used for hundreds of different tasks within Google which encompass a massive range of use patterns. It's a general-purpose system, even if it didn't start as such.

It's no coincidence that the entire Google stack (GFS/MapReduce/Chubby/BigTable) has been replicated as open source: it's because it's a broadly useful set of tools for doing large-scale work with data. It would be useful for thousands of companies if it was open-sourced.

I'd wager that the reason Google isn't open-sourcing GFS is because it's a key part of the "secret sauce" which powers a lot of Google innovation: the sauce that allows a single engineer to slap together a massively scalable, useful application in his spare time. I think that separates Google from their competition more than any specific app does.
The article is addressing verbal "attackers". The issues at hand aren't really issues; as the author states, most of the time the attacker is just trying to get attention.

The methods suggested by the article are methods to avoid hostile language. I think most would agree that hostile language is no way to effectively resolve an argument. Of course, if it's about something "which you care profoundly", then of course you should take the issue on directly.

In the end, I think the article is good advice, especially against people you don't know that well.
Elephant smack is 5000 times stronger than heroin
You've seen Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access?
My Son world heritage site - $170
Yeah except that's annoying to your actual users who were drawn to the basic service in the first place.
That's the sort of thing people say to me when I spend more than $10 on a mouse, too.
IIRC there already is at least one.
Is it really possible for a regular citizen to check with a university to find out what degree(s) someone has been awarded, or even their attendence record?

Is this something a registrar will divulge to just anyone? Or do the screenshots of the University of Maryland's registration application imply that someone on the inside checked into this for Dvorak?
Tunnel paths will be pre-planned so as to avoid interfering with existing infrastructure.

I for one am skeptical of this. There is _a lot_ of underground infrastructure which isn't documented. Just think about all of the wiring, sewer lines, gas lines, which are in a typical urban environment. Most of this just has to be found by hand digging. That said, I'd love to be proven wrong.
My 2c: Ask an amateur musician what they think of the site (ideally ask several). If they all say 'wow', then consider it. If they all shrug & say 'I can do this on [say myspace] easier' then don't.
The images themselves aren't that large, but are procedurally generated from sprites/stamps. But it's still damn impressive that they can keep up with that number of stampings at that scale. It's even more impressive when you figure they can do it in 1/60th of a second.
> Mudoo is a place for people to download music submitted by the artists.

If you're invited to be a founder that's what you'd like it to be :) Mudoo.com seems taken though, is that your working title or really what it will be launched under ?

If you're going with this drop me a line, we run two fair sized music sites, might give you a boost on launch.

As for advertising, audio advertising is going to be a tough sell on the web, especially since there is no 'click through' to be measured. I'd say you have to research the potential for ad sales (and preferably have some letters of intent) before you go all out to build it, look at what happened to IUMA when you don't have your businessplan worked out well and you do a high bandwidth project.
Just stick in a introduction, and drop the word "passionate" and suddenly it doesn't seem so awkward.

"It's a pretty nice day. Hasn't been too humid lately."

"Yeah, sure is. Hey, I'm Kevin" <extend hand, shake>

"I'm <name>"

"So what are you into, <name>?"
But you ARE just collecting links and saying "here they are".

http://briancray.com/2009/06/13/5-web-tools-user-experience/ Just a link with a "sign up for free" blurb.

http://briancray.com/2009/05/04/5-books-web-professionals/ Two sentence synopsis' with a link to Amazon.

http://briancray.com/2009/07/27/eye-tracking-studies-influen... Two sentence synopsis' with a link to the REAL content.

The REAL irony is the title of this post: "5 great examples of popular blog posts that you should know". It falls EXACTLY into your group of "XXX (the more the merrier) great examples of objects being rounded up with unique common characteristic".
Actually a study in Colorado showed that sitting in front does improve performance:

http://www.psycho.uni-duesseldorf.de/abteilungen/ddp/Dokumen...
Ask HN: What analytics service do you use?
I run a small bootstrapped startup that doesn't do any advertising via AdWords. We need an analytics package that is more usable than Google Analytics. I don't like how the numbers on GA don't jive with my server logs. Have tried a few others but haven't been happy. What does everybody else use?
With the amount of legit tech people in Obama's orbit this is seriously disappointing. Even if his credentials are authentic (TBD!), they're really underwhelming.
Teach for America and Teach First (the British equivalent) are actually doing a great job at addressing this problem. They are able to recruit teachers from top universities to work in some of the worst schools, precisely by focussing on the difficulties and challenges of the job.

From a different economist article:
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor...
"Nearly a tenth of Oxford’s class of 2009 will be Teaching First this autumn."

I've heard the statistics are similar with a huge percentage of Harvard's graduating class going into Teach for America.
Fast and Easy Javascript testing using JS Test Driver
anyone can check degrees with just a phone call, try it out right now
I noticed for my site that we are getting slightly different scores based on whether we submit pagerduty.com or www.pagerduty.com. We have it set up so that pagerduty.com does a 302 redirect to the www. The Voltmeter app should see both of these as a single domain.

The problems I have noticed:

* For pagerduty.com, the "Keyword Targeting" section shows: 1) moved, 2) permanently, 3) nginx. Looks like it does not follow the redirect.

* For the "Incoming Links" section, I get different results for pagerduty.com and for the www. Again, you should combine the 2 resultsets, as some people might link to the www and others to pagerduty.com.

* In the "Search Engine Index Inclusion" section, it says Pages Indexed by Bing: 68. We don't actually have 68 pages, so I don't see how this is possible.
You should move to London. Nobody will ever bother you, unless it's to shout at you for doing something wrong.