skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, some ads are definitely over the top. For the most part, I could survive without AdBlockPlus, but there is one type of ad that I detest more than any other: the audio ad. I can't even find words to describe how severely I detest advertisements that start talking when a page is opened.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Of_Maryland

"However, in 1997 the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation allowing the University of Maryland, College Park to be known simply as the University of Maryland, recognizing the campus' role as the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland."

No one of thinks "oh one of those Maryland universities with different faculties and different quality of education" when they hear University of Maryland. They think of College Park.

It may be splitting hairs, but we shouldn't even be having this conversation, as it should be clear on the bio page.
Are you serious?

"They're the most data rich and accessible"

Visual design aside, there's a distinct possibility that DC.gov is one of the most data rich government sites out there. The only problem is, well, finding the information. The findability level of this information is about like the hand-curated Yahoo! Directory from 1999.

And then there's accessibility. Maybe that means something different to you than me, but let's delve into it.

First of all, the page uses tables. That makes it a nightmare for any screen-reading software to utilize.

Turning off styles and javascript renders the main navigation useless.

The markup of the page is entirely table cells and font tags, granting no semantic meaning to the content whatsoever. This makes deep-searching the site even more problematic, as search engines have no context for the textual information contained within the page. E.g.; Google looks at h1 elements as having more important content than, say, a p element. It also limits the usefulness of screenreaders, as they read cell by cell, row by row. (thus, if two related pieces of content are in two cells, one on top of each other, they won't be read together - it will read the first one, then finish up the row before continuing on with the second cell).

Then there's deep-link URLs like, http://www.rrc.dc.gov/rrc/cwp/view,a,1182,q,447149,rrcNav_GI.... What does that even mean? Is it some attempt at securing the "Play in DC" page (which, to be honest, is fairly useless: all it does is list links to the history, entertainment, libraries, etc subpages.. the only reason it's needed is because the entire site design is one big Charlie Foxtrot).

Anyone who thinks this website is a "pretty good job" and has anything to do with: design, usability, accessibility, and SEO - well, you should probably turn in your card. Sorry to say. And if a C-level executive doesn't understand how -- especially with government sites -- accessibility for visually impaired individuals is extremely important, well. He either needs to be educated or, if ineffective, fired. It's nearly criminal (especially for a government website).

In finality:

Being a data rich site means nothing if accessing that data is akin to crawling through a swimming pool filled with broken glass and lemon juice. And then not even getting the information you were looking for when you first dove into the miasma of pain.
Go for the library support. I chose python because of existing functionality I needed now. Writing it from scratch would have been very time consuming.

As for non-web services, Python has some good GUI tools and some workable ways to make windows apps.

It also didn't hurt that google is behind python. The speedups targeted seem attainable. http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/

As for finding engineers who are good at ruby or python, it's pretty slim pickings for either.
It's the classic content owner's mistake of overvaluing the content, and undervaluing the platform.
While I'm not claiming to speak for all library employees, I worked for a public library for about six years* , including some time when wireless internet access was relatively novel. Someone camping out with a laptop wasn't a problem, even all day, provided they weren't being noisy (cell phones!), downloading porn, or otherwise being a nuisance. Actually, people who bring their own computers are probably a lot less trouble for staff, who may be busy keeping of track of whose turn it is next on the public computers, helping adults figure out how to file taxes online, etc.

The staff (and/or branch policy) ultimately decide what to do if a group of people is obviously using the library as a kind of temporary office, and they may request you make more formal arrangements. (The branches I worked at always had back rooms that could be rented out to tutors.) With several people, noise may be an issue. Still, one person typing, or two or three people working with occasional quiet collaboration is probably on par with a couple teenagers studying together. Just be considerate.

Libraries are paid for with tax dollars, and (as tptacek noted) staff are generally more nervous about empty libraries. Branch funding is often closely tied to usage stats - people coming through the door each day, circulation, internet station sessions, etc.

Also, depending on the neighborhood, the staff are probably more worried about drunk and/or mentally ill street people, misbehaving teenagers, etc. (Oh, the stories...)

* Great job to have through college, BTW.
Why is this a poll? Wouldn't it be easier and more accurate to just perform a test on your page to determine what your users block?
Ask HN: Could you build a startup around this "crowdfunding" model?
Wow, you really think he might lose his job over this? I hadn't even really allowed myself to dream such a thing. That would be peaches, though.

Let's be clear: Dvorak isn't just some guy, he's a professional troll. We're not picking him out of obscurity and pantsing him in front of his classmates. He chooses to be a writer, to push people's buttons, to publish inflammatory material without doing any kind of research. If he loses his job, it'll only be because this is somehow the first time he's actually crossed the line into libel, and if he's a mockery for the rest of his life, he's in the same state he was a week ago, except now maybe some political junkies are in on it, too.
thank you for sparing me, sir.
I think the followup to this story -- the impact on blogging, relationship of a columnist as a reporter, the degree of fact-checking needed before publishing, what, if anything happens to Dvorak -- is going to be much more interesting than the story itself.
Absolutely. There is a real beauty in quirkiness.
"When Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle in 1900, it unveiled its vision for the future of transport. The trottoir roulant was a moving walkway that circled the fair in a 3-kilometre loop, its articulated wooden segments "gliding around like a wooden serpent with its tail in its mouth", according to one reporter.

Chicago's walkway, the brainchild of engineer Max Schmidt, consisted of three rings, the first stationary, the second moving at 4 kilometres per hour and the third at 8 km/h, an arrangement that allowed walkers to adjust to each speed before moving to the next.

In fact, the idea of high-speed walkways had been established in New York longer than anywhere else. Back in 1871, local wine merchant Alfred Speer patented the first "endless-travelling sidewalk", and promptly proposed an ambitious elevated moving walkway along Broadway. It would have zipped pedestrians along at up to 30 km/h

Undaunted, Schmidt proposed a flurry of similar projects around Manhattan - running down Broadway, along Wall Street, over the Williamsburg Bridge and across 23rd and 34th Street. To Schmidt, the advantages of the moving walkway were so compelling that he was convinced they would supplant some subways rather than supplement them. By 1909, he was pushing a massive $70 million scheme that would provide Manhattan with a network of subterranean moving sidewalks."

- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327200.200-how-the-m...
Companies use standard legal agreements because using nonstandard legal agreements creates risk. When you experience the symptom of "getting stuck in legal because of inflexible standard contracts", the underlying cause isn't legal. It's that you aren't important enough to make an exception for.
These benchmarks don't seem to take HotSpot compilation into account, which means some of those numbers are for interpreted Java bytecode and some of those numbers are for native code and you don't know which are which.

The behavior of the DBs as far as resource consumption is interesting, but the numbers are meaningless.

Further reading:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp12214/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp02225.ht...
OP here. Read about this company on TC and found what they did interesting. Just wondering if you could build a simple startup around this model. I have a friend in finance who has access to accredited investors ... we were thinking we could charge them $1k a year for access to invest in startups who are in our system.

Startups would apply and must be accepted to be in our system. Maybe even charge them $500 to make sure they're serious (possibly refund it if they don't get any investment).

Just not sure what type of regulartory hurdles exist. Is this even possible at all?
That's true. I'm just a born cynic, and the App Store brings out the worst in me. All the get-rich-quick bullshit I see spewed everywhere burns me up.

But yeah, $100 is definitely reasonable, and $1k is not out of the question.
I know you are asking about ruby and python, but I don't think their strengths lie in interfacing with bluetooth, gps hardware devices, and running background jobs. You might want to look at some more industry standard languages.
[pdf]An emergent participatory design framework for higher education
Unless the poster's clientele consists solely of HN readers, they would probably end up getting different results.
Luckily, it's not true, as was debunked just a few hours later, and retracted by Mr Dvorak himself!
It's obvious he's doing this as a hobby. Legal? I'm sure it's on the threshold. This is where an inflexible legal system shows it's age.

He isn't hurting anybody, he's obviously having a great time. Netflix is making money/building loyalty from him. (They are building loyalty with all of us when we read this story.) The movie companies aren't suffering. It's a triple win.

But in a court of law, it's likely that he would be slapped.
Netflix uses an algorithm to slow down people like this.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_422313.html
sounds silly but there are great ideas in potty humor. people love to laugh at farts so its a good reason to develop an app. I wouldn't pay a buck for it but college kids and grown men in their 50's and 60's would too. <a href="http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1764689>ch... checks</a> <a href="http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1764689>ch... personal checks</a>
They're reading a brief news story, not an in depth analysis. Presumably they're smart enough to go elsewhere if they want to learn more. I'm not saying to write something incorrect, I'm saying the trick is to write something that's both correct, and comprehensible to the average person.
I think they would just break even until they couldn't afford their next bet after losing one color a lot. Whenever black would win, it would win at the expense of red, and vice versa.
Rewrote 2,650 lines of C as a seven line shell script. The previous programming team had written a data transfer program using their own implementation of ftp. I just used the one that was already on the computer.
I block all ads that annoy me enough that I decide to block them. That includes ads that don't load (or have at some point failed to load) and thus prevent me from seeing the web page they're supposed to appear on.
This is a duplicate of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755833
"general fix-all to the world's physical labors since at least the 1950's."

First, I'm not saying they're a "fix-all". I'm saying they're going to disrupt cost/benefit relations increasingly over the next few years. That's a much more defensible statement.

Second, part of the mental block that people are having with understanding this is that the promises that were made in the 1950s were premature, not wrong. Look at actual research coming out of robotics right now, not from the 1950s. It's still early, but there's been a qualitative change in the past couple of years; things are moving again. We got used to "nothing happening" so much so that it became just part of the mental background of our lives, but that doesn't make that rational.

There's nothing stopping people from being part of the delivery network, either. The most likely outcome is that it simply becomes an outgrowth of today's Fedex and UPS, starting in the cities and spreading out as the economics make sense. It's not even as much of a discontinuity as you might think, as from what I've seen of photos of the inside of the hubs, the hubs are already building-sized robots with small amounts of human help. It's just an expansion of the already-robotic-core of the delivery system, not an introduction of a brand new concept.
Automated method of finding the correct price of something?
It's called the stock market.

But I do look forward to having an agent go out and search not just on lowest price but some fitness function (% of being ripped off, chance of insane s/h fee's, etc) besides absolute price.
Python and Ruby both work fine for bare metal systems programming. Plenty of bare-metal systems programming projects have been executed on both.

I'm a Ruby advocate, but if "being like everyone else in industry" is one of your decision axes, Python is a more conventional choice for low-level programming (at least, outside of security).

The "industry standard language" choice you're alluding to is C, which is a terrible choice for a primary language in 2009.
OK, so find a city or state website anywhere in this country that does better.

Most municipalities don't even have government data available in scanned PDFs, let alone a huge set of documented XML feeds published live on the website.

(And incidentally, it's a myth that screen readers require semantic markup with CSS to work. They do not. Nor does Section 508 require it. Screen readers generally work just fine with table-based tag soup. The dc.gov site claims to be Bobby 508 compliant and I'm not in a position to dispute that.)
A thousand times yes! Allow free signup, and send me a $3 SMS when an alarm goes off, avoiding any need for credit card billing.

Another option would be to have a purely prepaid plan, where your account gets debited based on alarms/users per-period, and per-incident. I'm definitely going to use this service while it's free, but I don't think I'd pay $120/year for it unless I had a web startup.
Swine flu: How experts are preparing their families
Teenagers and college kids making a fortune is newsworthy. People making a fortune during their prime earning years isn't. You don't have a real question. You're too old to start a company when you're you're too old to work a full-time day.
My experience says that the teenage and college success stories are the outliers. But, they make for good press, just like a plane crash is more sensational than than 5000 individual daily car crashes (I just made the 5000 number up, but you get the point).

Too old would be 1 day before death, but you never know when that will be, so you might as well get started.
Did you read the article about the Netflix processing center? There isn't any automation on the envelope side, rather there are teams of people opening them up and pulling the discs and the sleeves.

I think the barcode window is entirely for outgoing routing.
My local library is nice, but they block SSH access. That's a bigger downside than the distractions at the coffee shop next door.
Myabe I'm biased (working with Microsoft tech), but if Microsoft indeed "crushed" these netbooks it would only be because of the failing of competing operating systems.

Myself, I use Ubuntu on my netbook and have no issue with that (since I use it mostly for terminals and Firefox), but the current releases aren't exactly polished diamonds either.

If Microsoft were one day to go away and die, I wonder what all these people who constantly blame them for absolutely everything between the heavens and earth would do when it turned out the world didn't automatically turn into a perfect, flawless dream-world.
Don't show incremental user numbers in URLs for commercial services. It's nice to know you were one of the first to sign up for a community thing, but it's offputting when you're paying :/

The yellow boxes under "Follow these steps to get started..." look a little godaddy-ish
If my code crashes in the night, save the core files, logs, etc and send me a mail; unless of course the system is not restartable - then you have bigger issues. Calling an engineer in the night is going to prompt what? Sane code changes? QA'd code?
The only thing about that is that I really don't see the value of Netflix in getting new movies fast, I personally like the back catalog aspect. Like, I've been going through all the Miyazaki films, and there's a lot of independent movies, and cornball sci-fi movies. Heck, the watch instantly feature is awesome for that too.

I love Netflix.
Rate HN: Our site - Looklookbuy
url - http://www.looklookbuy.com

Hey HN!

Two other HNers (Oompa and Zarathu) and I have gotten together to create Looklookbuy. We grew frustrated of having to jump from site to site, Craigslist to Amazon to eBay, etc, to find product prices. So we started work on Looklookbuy to hopefully alleviate some of those frustrations, in the hopes of others finding the service useful as well. We still have many things we'd like to implement, and are close to implementing, like more filtering options to help clean up the noise, and the ability to 'save' an ad via email. We do know that results can get a bit noisy and are working to change that, and are open to suggestions. We wanted to show you all what we had so far, and hope to use your feedback to make the site much better!

Some questions:

-Do you find it useful?

-What do you like/hate?

-What would you change?

-How would you increase the signal/noise ratio?

Some things we will be adding soon:

-Pagination

-Common words filter

-Saving ads via email

-More websites added to each product category

-More details regarding the individual product results

Thank you very much to those who will leave feedback/criticisms. We really value this community's opinions.

Follow us on Twitter @looklookbuy, if you wish.
When you first create your Palm profile, there is a location privacy disclaimer than you can accept or not. Basically, the Pre uploads your location to Google so that they can improve their tower and wifi based location services. You can opt out at anytime in the Location preferences.
I used to think that Apple didn't have a good reason to enter the netbook space, but now I'm thinking otherwise when I read stuff like this.

It's not so much that Apple needs to be competing in the low end (they don't), but that if there's no alternative at those sizes based on the licensing issues, maybe there's an opportunity there.

Anyway, it would in fact seem that many netbook users are not exactly heavy users of local applications; classically they're mostly using the web and mail. And then, of course, the disadvantages of not having the Windows OS become much less.
Mapping the world, one street at a time
I think this comment is perverse.

Please don't attack the messenger

That phrase has always referred to someone delivering an unwanted truth. There was no "message" here at all, and no "messenger". "Please don't attack the libeler" would be more accurate. That doesn't pack the same pseudo-compassionate punch, does it?

Unless you have proof that Dvorak was purposely lying

That is an impossibly high and irrelevant bar. Gross irresponsibility, incompetence, and total disrespect for the truth aren't enough for you?

slandering him

Wow. That's a rich use of the word "slander", considering the activity this guy was just engaging in.
What a revelation! I can't wait to tell it to my lawyer friend who hasn't taken a math class since his sophomore year of highschool and makes $145k/yr three years removed from an English degree.

Won't his face be red!
Last time I heard the phrase web 3.0 was when I met an "Internet Visionary" in a bar. He tried to recruit me for his startup: a facebook killer written in Java. I tried to view the site, but it didn't work in Firefox.
Hmm... I guess you have a point there. It's frustrating a bit as a developer because in all likelihood if they've done their jobs as developers they DON'T have access to your password at all. The problem is how do you trust a new site when there are obviously some (many?) out there that still use plaintext for passwords? Anyone have a solution for that? Some type of security audit w/a badge that your site can display saying "Hey, we DON'T store your password or have access to it!"

What would you say if they instead used some form of OpenID system (RPX Now or something) so you didn't have to give them your password? Would that help?
So what software manages the pagerduty for pagerduty? :-)
Where is Hacker News? Well maybe its better that people don't know about it
If you're curious, for our marketing site, we took inspiration from a couple of different sites, including 37signals, chartbeat.com, goodbarry.com, freshbooks.com and a few others I can't remember off the top of my head. I bet a lot of the aforementioned sites took some inspiration from 37signals as well :).

For the application site, we started with the open-source Web App Theme (http://github.com/pilu/web-app-theme/tree/master) and changed it to suit our needs.
the phrase "picking up nickels in front of a steam roller" refers to doing something dangerous for little gain.
I was just wondering how did you stumble upon the idea for your product? Was it born out of a problem, or?

Yes -- I needed good backups (I had seen people lose data and was having nightmares), needed them to be secure (as FreeBSD Security Officer I have sensitive information which I don't want to have released via my backups), and couldn't find any secure backup solutions available which I felt were trustworthy.
You can test this on yourself by considering which day of the week a meeting has changed to, if it was originally planned for Wednesday but has been moved forward two days.

I had to read this sentence ten times before I realized how it can be interpreted any different from the meeting is on Friday.

I realized I was assuming forward meant to the right on a calendar, but that means my default way of interpreting relative times is inaccurate. If they had said "back" instead of "forward," I would have also thought Friday. Clearly, if antonyms indicate the same thing to me, then I'm the one who's wrong, but it's still surprising to me.

The only phrase that would make me think Monday is, I think, "push the meeting up." But, while I would think Friday if it was "push the meeting back," the phrase "push the meeting down" sounds nonsensical to me.

This is why natural language processing is hard.
I've tried Scala out for several shorter projects and have left unimpressed by its overall design. It has a great list of features, the type system and actors are my favorite, but it lacks coherence. Scala is usable and people build real software with it, I'm certain that what I dislike about the language is irrelevant to some.

I hoped for Scala to be Haskell on the JVM but it felt more like C++. It's clumsy, which may be the result of feature creep and lack of a single, strong design philosophy.