skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Odd... it's personal preference here then. In my opinion python's style shouldn't be mixed with HTML at all. Again, I still need to look further into web.py's templating, but the endifs/endfors mix with HTML much better than python's style to me.
I'm using CherryPy for a project right now, and it certainly has some weirdness to it -- it tries to abstract HTTP just a little bit too much, and ends up doing some seriously stupid shit:

By default all exposed methods can be called as GET or POST, with keyword arguments found appropriately.

cherrypy.engine keeps a bunch of static state internally -- once you've started it, you can't restart it (or even catch an exception in start() and retry) with different settings -- you have to start over again in a new process (as you can't unload modules in cpython).
I have to remember to shut that site down. I removed almost all my stuff back in June. It's all archived, but the archives aren't online yet. I'm trying to figure out how best to put it all up again.

My new essays are all on Facebook at the moment.
The point of the article is that drinking diet soda frequently messes with your internal connection between sweetness and being satisfied (full) in generally.

So in other words, people who drink diet soda will in general eat more and drink more of other sweet things in general and thus gain wait because their internal connections no long correspond to the real world.

That is why they would gain weight, not from the sodas directly.

Assuming of course that the hypothesis holds.
Gartner Consulting is in the Cloud Collision Fail Bucket
Great time-lapse video of how the plant grows. I would have liked to see how the rat actually gets trapped though.
Note dispiriting Wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepenthes_attenboroughii

Evidently, the journal article says no rats have been discovered eaten by this plant.
Google AppEngine's 'webapp' is web.py done right.
The implication that people behave like rats with absolutely no ability to reflect upon or control those cravings, however, is not.

The implication that all people behave that way is clearly false.

The implication that a substantial percentage behvae as if they have no ability to reflect upon or control those cravings is probably true.
Fixnums have a different representation in the interpreter (at least in 1.8 MRI) than normal objects do, which is probably what tripped me up here.
All good points, but the article points out that this is in early development stages. Most likely it will receive that much needed polish in short order with Canonical's resources behind it.

(Edited to correct an amiguous phrase.)
> how can anyone do business with them and take them seriously?

I agree they could do a much better job, but business customers do get support. At one point we were paying for maps, and we had a rep and a phone number to call, etc.
IEEE 754 double precision can represent numbers with about 16 decimal digits of precision, however Google calculator (from anecdotal evidence) seems to only reliably represent numbers with 14 of precision (ex. http://www.google.com/search?q=99999999999999+-+999999999999...)

Interestingly, for pure decimal operations it seems some other floating point representation is used. For example, http://www.google.com/search?q=1.0+-+0.2+-+0.2+-+0.2+-+0.2+-... returns mathematically correct result of zero. If double precision were being used it should return the mathematically incorrect result of 0.0000000000000000555 because of floating point representations errors.
Not true in Python either since new-style classes unified types and classes.
but lending club beat them to it... or am i misunderstanding?
I second the support for "export from your app". This signals that you're confident that customers will stay with you because they like your product, not because they are locked in. It may not be easy, but it's a way to reduce the risk of entry.
Poll: Do you live with your Co-Founders?
I guess there are a lot of pros and cons to this. Curious to see what others think.
It would be interesting to know the funding frequency for those Angel Groups that charge for pitching vs those that don't.

I would assume that they (those who charge) fund at the same rate as other Angels, which basically makes the claim of "filtering quality" bogus.
In the article, it mentions Bradford's Amazon wishlist.

For the curious: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/3RB4REDIKE28I

And those that have been purchased (a better list): http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/3RB4REDIKE28I?rev...
Jobs, Back at Apple, Focuses on New Tablet
Kickstarter: Dollar by Dollar, Patrons Find Artists on the Web
I suppose this could be an interesting series but as far as I can tell all this article said was: "I'm soon going to write some stuff about craigslist."
Leopard, pre 10.5.2, was indeed a mess. Lots of performance problems. I don't think it was until 10.5.5 that it caught up to Tiger in terms of performance and stability. 10.6.0 is great out of the box.
$125 million to translate from one computer language to another. I'm underpaid.
While I'll bet this calculation is intuitive to most of the HN readership, I'll also bet that it's completely inscrutable to the general public.

The driving public is attuned to MPG, and there's clearly a lot at stake in manipulating any new standard to reflect the proprietary interests of car companies, oil companies, environmentalists, battery makers, and everyone else out there seeking to cash in on the hybrid gold rush.

I'm hoping that the government will step in and create a neutral, science-based standard like this one. Hoping.
I like what you're getting at in the last sentence, it really resonated with me.

I think almost as importantly fighting (in a sport context anyway) teaches you that there's a time when it's best to let things go. Learning to tap when you recognize that someone really has something locked is an important skill!
Enlisting Computers to Unravel the True Complexity of Disease
I was referring to SEC approval to do something unorthodox with securities online. I'm ignorant of the space, so it's quite possible someone beat them to it.
Right. Specifically, it's the intersection of a public domain license and a program that gets a lot of commercial use (esp. embedded in devices). I know of some other public domain programs (off the top of my head: several of lhf's libraries for Lua), but nothing else that has had the license carefully scrutinized for commercial use.
Launching the Windows7sins Campaign
Do you think your links constitute a fair representation of that data that's against me? Go read them again. The foundational study was with 5 year olds who got a ribbon. Follow on studies were college students in creative writing courses and other fully contrived scenarios. You really want to base your beliefs about a fundamental trait of humanity on that?

Just look around you. People work for money, for sex, for food, for all kinds of external motivators, far more than to fulfill their inner personal happy centers. The fact that some people are miserable because they think they've found their dream job when really it's just another way to pay the bills has other explanations than this weak sauce.
It is only difficult to deal with average people if you believe yourself to be above them and look down on them.

Nonsense. Unless you are going to insist on two things: that everyone has the same cognitive capacity, within some delta; assuming the first, that anyone in a conversation who leaves anyone else behind in understanding is at least a narcissist, and possibly otherwise degenerate.

People don't get difficult just because you are intentionally condescending to them. People learn at different rates, people reason at different rates, and some people take the mere acknowledgment of this fact as condescending and narcissistic. They also take the fact that a conversation amongst friends went down a particular thread faster than they could keep up as a sign they are being patronized and degraded. Social etiquette would dictate that the conversation always slow down to the point that everyone keeps up, but that has its own drawbacks, not the least of which that it turns being able to think and reason fast into a psychosis -- so this looking down upon can go both ways, and usually does if even behind the veil of social propriety. Neither party is guilt-free here.

You only annoy people by asking questions at inappropriate times, if you were really that much smarter then you would know when to ask and when to shut it.

As I pointed out in a different thread here, what happens in the case when the inappropriate time is unreasonably restrictive -- for instance, there is no appropriate time. Are you really going to assert that a smart person show unwavering obedience? Do you realize the consequences of such a philosophy?

I'm not defending the OP; I think his list of correlations is presumptuous. However, the responses here (so far) are likewise very presumptuous about the poster -- perhaps it is to dose the poster with his own medicine, but that it is done under the auspices of discussion social skills is quite ironic. I really wish this were not the standard knee-jerk reaction of the community to these sorts of posts.
I for one absolutely admire Craigslist’s non-branded, not-for-profit mentality. Regardless of its primitiveness, Craigslist serves its purpose exceptionally well. Apparently, not all companies need profits to keep them focused.

eBay can’t seem to provide a decent customer experience to save its life regardless of how much it charges for listings. Instead of improving their product, best strategy they can come up with is to buy a minority share in craigslist so that they can strongarm the company.

It is also very telling that people (especially the newspapers) think Craigslist has a duty to not undercut their outdated classifieds by not being free. You know they are really reaching for somebody to blame.
I don't know of any written interviews or mailing list posts offhand, but I linked (elsewhere in this this discussion) to a Google tech talk in which he mentions it. It isn't really detailed, just an "Oh man, I thought that would have made things simple, but actually..." sort of aside. The interview/post probably has more info.
most carnivorous plants have tiny hairs and spikes that only point downward, making it very difficult for insects and other things to climb anywhere but down further into the digestive liquids. I would imagine that this one also has that feature.
Good god . . . the FSF has outdone itself on the subject of ill-conceived, asinine publicity stunts (as long as we don't count RMS appearances among its publicity stunts).
It's a bad sign when Jeff Atwood is your biggest proponent :/
. . . but you can't tell anyone about it except by linking to it, because Wolfram Alpha copyrighted it.
He actually did write an article about Craig's List.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_...
I'm sure it would only require indent fixing if coded properly.
Both Yahoo[1] and Bing[2] get it right.

[1] http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu.i5PZNKqSoAurJXNyoA...
[2] http://www.bing.com/search?q=999999999999999+-+9999999999999...
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess
I'll try my best. It's an entrepreneurial contest judging the creativity and business potential of ideas. The judges are largely local VCs/angel investors with a couple of academics and local business owners.

Our idea is a tech idea with I guess tiny overlap of someone like Digg.
I think the main reason the G1 didn't do better is its lack of effective advertising. It's actually a better device (though I hear the G2 is actually going to do away with some of the advantages of the G1, the morons).
10 Biggest Weight-Loss Mistakes - Page 4
Someone didn't get the message about not trashing your competition.
Chris Harrison gave a presentation at the University of Washington last week on his most recent project at Microsoft Research: Turning the arm into an input device.

By measuring the vibrations that are transmitted through the arm bones, it's possible to determine roughly where a person is tapping on their arm. Possibly the most impressive demo was dialling a phone number on the palm of your hand.
Yes. It's not obvious, but there are a bunch of links at the bottom of the page. Very interesting reading, lots of interesting details.
That's more than a thousand man-years. Absurd.
lending club works differently.
DHH's great talk at startup school also covers this:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-mone...
The problem is not with precision, but in using floats to represent money.

Why in the fuck would you try to do financial math with anything but fixed-point or rational numbers?
I love the "Good Deeds" section: "Things you can do to make Typedia better." Great idea.
Why HN blows: killed submissions
Submissions are randomly killed without explanation and removed data: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782927

Note, I did not submit the above link. Can't wait for mine to die.
Does this count as an anonymous recursive function?

a = (function(x) {return x == 0 ? 1 : x * arguments.callee(x - 1)})(8);
It's actually really exciting that neighborgoods exists. Do you have any idea how they're planning on monetizing? I did this as a weekend project and am considering open sourcing because it doesn't really seem like there's a demographic that's clamoring to pay. I guess maybe small brick-and-mortar businesses might want hyperlocal targeting, maybe.

As far as reputation system, instead of pulling eBay's reputation data, I was hoping to build a sharing-borrowing reputation system. I don't have any reason to think that being a good eBay seller/buyer would make someone a timely and careful borrower/lender.

"Stuff lending" seems like the sort of thing us internet folks could help with, though, which is why I built ShareLocally.

Do you know where the beta of NeighborGoods is starting?
Turnkey Solution

(My brain always translates to turkey inducing...)
It would also help if the link to "Twilio.com" up top didn't point to "blog.twilio.com".
Ask HN: Creating a Twitter "@" Bot?
I'd like to create a bot for the Hackers and Founders twitter handle (http://twitter.com/hackersfounders) so that the community can send replies to the name and receive updates automatically. Here are two examples: http://twitter.com/nytech and http://twitter.com/ycfounders
Translating Java bytecode to X86 assembly code
Werkzeug
Try the streaming API from Twitter.

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation
David Recordon Leaves Six Apart To Join Facebook
Is it necessary to mention that some client relationships fall into neither category?
Not sure if you skipped the text or you just wanted to see this happen, but in case it's the former:

>The plant lures in the rats with the promise of sweet nectar. When the rat leans into the plant to drink the saccharine liquid, it slips on the pitcher's waxy interior, and gets stuck in the gooey sap.
Bummer that the only female DJ got the boot. KNRK is a great station; it was what I listened to delivering pizzas, my first year of Uni @ Pacific University. One night somebody left Offspring's (which was at the time "new") album containing "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" on repeat all night long. . . the next morning the DJs were laughing really hard about it, talking about how they could get into lots of trouble for doing that.

I wonder if its just an inevitable fate of any "independent" operation, to eventually be swallowed by the CWGs (Crazy White Guys)? This snippet from Tara Dublin's post is very interesting: "In my nearly five years at KNRK, I was constantly dealing with frustration when it came to trying to improve on what we were already doing. We had no advertising budget. You never saw a billboard or bus ad or a single TV commercial." http://oregonmediacentral.com/2009/07/guest-commentary-an-op....

CWGs and the conglomerate-type thinking seem to be inextricably linked.
Seems to me that if you're solving a real problem for a real audience and put in the doing the market schlep, then it would be easy enough for you to reach your customers in the 5,000,000.

No one publishes a list of the Fortune 5,000,000. But having a convenient list of 500 companies published in a magazine once a year doesn't make them any more likely to pay attention to you anyway.
'I want to make sure that every kid has a Linux-Powered computer'
Meh. Oppression is in the eye of the beholder. Some would say the US is oppressive because we torture people and start wars. Or that Steve Jobs verbally abuses his employees. Nothing is black and white.

I once had an interviewee walk out of the interview because she thought we charged too much for our software (it started at $2k and was priced lower than the competition). She was so angry she was shaking. For a few seconds I thought about explaining supply and demand or the complexities of building software for a financial services vertical... but instead I thanked her for her time.
Part of the game is that he has to continue using Facebook, Flickr, his cell phone, etc.

http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/08/author-evan-ratliff-is-o...

Otherwise, he would just go sit in the woods for a month and it wouldn't be much of a game.
Poverty Kills
I know I'm going to get killed, but...

Isn't what he did just good old fashioned thinking?
Well put. Observe that Google is treating customer complaints not as a customer support issue, but as a PR issue. When the PR goal is met (people are happy or unhappy in silence) the problem is solved.
The general rule with medical software is to estimate the cost in money and time and multiply it by 100.
Endless second guessing of social interactions.
From the article: "Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com". According to Compete, this statement is not true: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/amazon.com+craigslist.com+e...

Or did I misunderstand something?
Like with most things in the world, if you have no self-control or ability to control your impulses, then life is going to be very difficult for you.
My links constitute some of the research done about this issue. Do you have any research that disagrees with the data I've provided?

Of course people work for money, for sex, for food, etc. I wasn't saying they don't. What I am saying is that people's intrinsic motivation to do a task is lessened when they're paid to do so. There's a story -- I don't remember where I read it, unfortunately -- that when a group of coders were paid for each bug found, the number of bugs found went up. However, when the bugs-for-pay program ended, the number of bugs found went down. Their intrinsic motivation was lessened when they have extrinsic rewards for doing so -- they no longer looked as hard, or as long for bugs as when their motivation was internal. I don't know why you're calling it "weak sauce"; it's been studied and found to be true. Is there anything beyond "you don't like the idea" that you can cite as reason you think it's false?
FWIW, I've been talking to the author about RentHop, so he's doing a decent amount of original research for the series.
The "usual self" isn't necessarily a consolation. Otherwise people wouldn't be trying to get out of it in the first place.
This is new media marketing at its finest.

How do you ensure that your newly discovered species makes it on the next Planet Earth? Name it after David Attenborough. :-P

Even scientists are reading Seth Godin's blog these days.
I take solace in the fact that people actually read Code Complete - it's not just a bookshelf ornament. Yes, I know, Knuth is God, and his work is a masterpiece - the point is nobody actually reads the friggin thing.
People who drink lots of diet soda probably drink more because they are used to the taste and it has no direct influence on weight gain.

Given the choice between a diet soda and water? I'll take the soda, thanks, unless I'm really thirsty. Better taste, without excess calories.

Maintaining a healthy diet isn't rocket science; drinking diet soda rather than water won't influence your weight unless you alter your diet in other ways.

That's what self-control is for. Rats don't have much of that.
Missing option: I don't have co-founders. :-)
If the reason wasn't technical, what was the reason?

The first thing that springs to my mind is that Google calculator is free, and more precision isn't.
Thanks Hexis. The key for us was being able to combine deep domain expertise with Brad's data-mining capabilities. The model is a nice mix of statistical induction and domain-based logic. We're adding more data sources to it, so both the power of the algorithms and capabilities will only get better.

~Jason (@FlightCaster)
How big is $9 trillion?
I try to remember the quote, "...for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

I had a terrible sports injury, damage to the cartilage in my left knee a few years back. Left me not able to do a great many things I used to, and I have to be cautious on all the rest. I've got to stretch 10 minutes a day or my leg starts hurting. For a while, I could barely walk - I was taking industrial-strength doses of anti-inflammatories and doing physical therapy, icing my leg nightly.

For a while, I called the few minutes I hurt my leg "the worst 10 minutes of my life", because it seemed to be massively inconvenient and painful on a long term basis, with absolutely no gain whatsoever.

And yet, somehow, I took a great many lessons from it with time. I do everything slower and more deliberately now, I pay close attention to my health, I floss, I take care of my back. A bit embarassing to say so, but it severely limited what I could do in the bedroom - but the irony is, it made me a better lover. I lost all variety, because any position that came from weight on my knees I couldn't do for more than a minute of a time. All the strength and power had to come from my arms, shoulders, and maybe a touch from my hips. But losing all variety, and being limited to just a couple ways of making love - it gave me an immense amount of practice and forced me to think really critically. I'd say I'm probably a better lover now, injured, than I ever was before fully healthy.

Ironic huh? IQ clearly has a lot of benefits, but sure, a lot of downsides too. In the end, it's what you make of it and how you think of it. Here's the scene from Hamlet:

http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/nothing-either-good...

Hamlet:
What have you, my good friends, deserv'd at the hands of
Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

Guildenstern:
Prison, my lord?

Hamlet:
Denmark's a prison.

Rosencrantz:
Then is the world one.

Hamlet:
A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and
dungeons, Denmark being one o' th' worst.

Rosencrantz:
We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet:
Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
Apple, Google, and Google Voice: It gets weird
Google link for those of us who don't subscribe:
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB...
Maybe I'm alone here but the part of the article about the NYT working with wikipedia for the past 7 months to censor information about their kidnapped journalist is more troubling to me than the article/Wikipedia change itself.

I understand their reasoning - and that thankfully it worked since the reporter is now safe - but doesn't it seem really odd for a leading newspaper to admit to working to censor news?

Not to sound completely paranoid or cliche but... Where does the NYT / Wikipedia draw the line on something like this? Is WP working with any organizations to censor information?