skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How To Add A Header Image To Your Wordpress Blog
Would you like to replace the default text-based WordPress blog header with a graphical header image to give your WordPress blog that personal touch? This tutorial will show you how to replace a text-based header in WordPress with a header image.
A Case for Valuing Twitter at $2.7 Billion
Follow up from us: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829238
It takes no extra effort to enter in the wrong item, so the cost of doing so is about zero.

As far as what satisfaction I gain from it... I suppose I find it to be a sort of rebellious act. Also, I did not get accepted into Carnegie Mellon.
Music Industry Wants Apple To Pay For 30-Second Song Previews
Are users of HN free agents or does good karma imply they must never disagree with anything coming from one particular source..?
One Year Later, Disgruntled iPhone App Developer Still Disgruntled
I'm kind of confused...seems like TC are undermining their own brand here. If several TC50 entries were so boring that they're apologizing for it afterwards, does that mean their selection process was flawed, or are they just saying they were deluged with umpteen 'me too' ideas and many of their selections were not good, just the least bad? I feel a bit sad for the companies mentioned :-/

But then, as they say in the comments, how would twitter have looked on day 1? I admit that when I first heard of it, I thought it was something for people who couldn't understand IRC.
Spreadsheets vs. Relational Databases: Bridging the Gap
Are there any Maple trees that do not either drop sap or other liquids or large seed pods? We're all familiar with the mess the former makes of our cars and sidewalks. The latter, at least the ones from Sugar Maples, are a real pain in the ass, clogging storm drains and such.
I don't think the comment is really about microblogs. It's about the cycle of some product becoming popular, adding features, becoming complicated, being competed against by newcomers that say "at least 80% of people don't need 80% of this stuff" and come up with something much simpler that gets the job done, adding features, becoming complicated.

That's not necessarily bad. I don't think byrneseyeview is suggesting this is something you shouldn't do, just observing patterns.
I agree, but I think that if this essay had been written by someone else, it probably would not have made the front page.
Or when the goals are decided by the private owners who bought them lunch.

I think you missed the point. If the property in question were privately owned, then the goals concerning the property would be the owners' goals, not the politicians' goals. To the extent that the politicians' goals control property, the property isn't privately owned (except for the corner case of property the politicians privately own).
Rich Hickey's Keynote: A deconstruction of object-oriented time [pdf]
Our response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829238
No -- they'll just be pissed to keep hearing the alarm go off and you rustling the bed, unless you have to wake up at the same time.
Counting money 'makes people feel better about themselves'
"That's why I use Eiffel."

This is just Eiffel propaganda.
This isn't utterly pointless. I'm glad I know about it, and I wouldn't have without this essay.

Or were you just saying "in general"? If so, point me to something PG has put online that is utterly pointless. He has a remarkably good filter for useful content, even within his own essays there are rarely sentences that are extra.
The site FAQ says that they're going to make the offer available in other countries as well.
I agree Taitems.

I also think that the images should be pre-loaded to avoid a short blank spot on the page when you first start flicking through the search options.
Actually C# is much better than Java in this area.
This is like being lectured on good manners by Kanye West. Good message from a source with no credibility on the subject whatsoever.
Wow, you're not only an excellent designer but an excellent writer as well. My suggestion: ask permission to record your conversations with them for future "This American Life" style podcasts. Yes, I know the jet engine noise might be intractable for audio quality.
California Ave. is notably nice because that pattern of building is now illegal in most parts of the Bay Area and the United States as a whole. People like visiting walkable cities and the walkable enclaves of their own suburbs, but if someone actually proposes building something like that, people raise hell.

"Mixed-use is not appropriate for this site," Palmer said. "It impinges on the little residential neighborhood that's been developed."

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=1080...

Read the descriptions of the projects and see how remarkably tiny they are. Then read the comments. It's quite sad.
Apple gave Gene Roddenberry the first Mac Plus. Now it's up for auction.
What do you expect? It was posted in a forum for an Eiffel audience. It is beyond my control that someone posted the link here.
Because writing for TechCrunch is really changing the world. I'm waiting for the "Memo to TechCrunch: you're supposed to do serious journalism, remember?"
This might be unconnected, but having just read PG's piece on publishing, and being in the local news business, it seems as though there may have been meetings about this decision? Published in the local newspaper perhaps?

At least, most developments and streetscaping projects around here don't go down with at least a (public) city council vote.

I'm not sure what my point is... maybe just that I'm curious what the local media coverage of this is/was?
This makes it even less clear for me because it appears you can use the upgrade version on a clean system:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Installing-and-r...
You're reading way too much in my comment...

For starters, I didn't say that the story about oaks getting hacked is pointless. Note also that I didn't say that PG puts pointless essays online.

My comment was on what PG comments on HN. If somebody asks PG a question and he briefly replies "yes", the comment gets upvoted beyond what is reasonable, even if it's the question, NOT the answer, that carries the interesting information. Hell, a Y/N answer only carries 1 bit of information...

I was trying to point out that, contrary to popular belief, HN is not immune to herd phenomena. In a way, this might be a good sign. It shows that we're humans. It shows that computers haven't yet passed the Turing test.
Google Delivers New Java-like Language: Noop
So, this morning I got up, and noticed my ssh session had died overnight. Didn't think much of it, and headed into the day job.

While doing the morning rounds, and saw that: 1) Cool! Someone likes my editor enough to post it on HN! 2) Well, now I know why my ssh session died.

Unfortunately, there's not much I can do about it from here, so the web site will have to remain down for a while. Thanks for all the kind comments though!
Sure, it looks ugly now, but I think it'll look decent in two years, and pretty good in five. I actually agree that it will look better with uniform height trees than gradually replacing trees. It just doesn't seem like that huge of a deal. The street is temporarily ugly. This too shall pass.
my downvote button is disabled since I submitted the article, please do the honors for me. thanks.

(referring to troll comment above)
I don't know what happened with this project since that letter to JetBlue's CEO, but Mr. Q has completely and single-handedly saved what always sounded like a questionable idea.
Condom testing robot
Silly. First of all, pg virtually never writes anything pointless. Even if he does, a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.

At any rate, pg is a recursive input to the hn community. Part of this community is pg. Part of this community is you and me, too, but a bigger part is him.

A large part of why I came here in the first place is pg's essays, which span the gamut. I came to think of him as a clear thinker, so I'm going to pay more than usual attention to anything he has to say.
Multi select with the keyboard:
* Option one: select a few lines, then press Ctrl+Shift+L to split the selection into one per line
* Option two: Ctrl+Alt+Up or Down

Thanks for the heads up about All Hallows Eve... I'll fix it for the next beta. Minimap is tediously resizeable via Preferences/General Preferences (change the value for the minimapMaxWidth value).

There's no built in command to move to the next/prev whitespace line, but it'd be pretty easy to whip up with a Python plugin.
Give the man a break, he's living on a plane for 30 days.
Link mildly NSFW.

(Article too depressing to keep reading).
I have always thought that money isn't the most important thing in life, but it is the best way to keep score. Counting money, having more money, etc. all make you feel like you are winning which explains the good emotions.
Eskimo bowline is non-exploding, nevertheless I wouldn't use bowline (or eskimo bowline) while rock climbing without somehow securing the working end.

Kalmyk loop (which is exploding variant of eskimo bowline) is probably not secure enough for rock climbing, but better than bowline for other tasks. Less likely to spill and easier to untie.
Steve Wozniak: How I Invented the Personal Computer
heh, Yahoo did try to acquire Google early on actually. Trying to find exact link.
Maybe you should've specified which comment you wanted people to downvote, because everyone seems to be downvoting your comment! ;)

Edit: I was just joking; I didn't expect you'd actually add that last line. I think everyone knew what you meant.
I thought he made his take on making money with information pretty clear: You make money off information others can make money off :) Now just think about types of information with which people can make money. Hint: It ain't just stock tips.
It seems to me that part of the problem here is that the Scala solution misuses mailboxes--not terribly surprising. I've been unable to find an idiomatic Erlang solution, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that one a) exists and b) works.
You can look at, or create, innovation all day long and not even see, recognize it.
Isn't 340 requests per second a good way to get yourself blocked from the DNS server?
For me I use my work (http://sleep.fm) to wake up to and I leave my mac mini on so i have to get up, walk across room, turn monitor on & stop the alarm.

I don't share this fellow hackers pain(more so waking up got easier after getting into a 9 to 5 routine), but I do wonder how huge of a pain point this is? How many face this same problem and if you do, how old are you? thnx if you share!
Are these people that have met the actual people or just read their websites?
I find the premise a bit questionable. Was Google recognizable as a company that was going to change the world when it was a startup? Altavista, Yahoo existed. Wasn't it just trying to make existing things better?
His observations on the conflation of identity/state/value in OO are very insightful (and I agree with them with the reservation that they apply nearly equally to simple structs of non-OO languages, as well).

But the conclusions drawn seem to be yet another attempt at deriving a paradigmatic model (of reality) that is "simplistic" (to borrow his critique of OO). If the object is now to graduate to subject -- a fine idea -- then we should remember that sentient modality of being includes repose, as well as action.
Sailing is quite possibly where that saying originated.
I knew it was time to look for a new job when they said....
If you think that the Barber problem looks simple, odds are you haven’t tried to implement it. There are quite a few things which can go wrong when we have several agents working on shared data, primarily

Deadlocks
Race conditions

A bit off-topic, but I see statements like this all the time, and I always wonder: why is it assumed that you're going to throw together an aggressive design that shoots for theoretically optimally performance, and then trying to ferret out the bugs? Ideally, the solution will be both correct and optimally performant, but if you're worried that you aren't going to get it right, you should start thinking about the best way to fail. It seems wiser to start with a simple dumb solution you know is correct and work carefully towards a more complex, better-performing solution. In that case you would list "crappy performance" as the primary thing that can go wrong in a concurrent system -- but nobody ever does. They're worried about bugs. That means that when they're done with their first attempt, they'll be confident in its performance but not in its correctness.

Here's why I think it's better to start with a simple dumb solution and work from there: you can stop short of an ideal solution. Maybe you only have to optimize it well enough so that it isn't the scaling bottleneck. Or maybe you can just deploy it and tolerate the performance limitations. If you start with code that has the optimal performance characterists but isn't correct, you can't deploy it until you fix all the bugs. You've committed yourself to creating an ideal solution, even though an ideal solution might not be necessary.
3 ways MySQL uses indexes
Why the press can't get enough of Harvard or Yale murders.
I think there's a time factor too...for much of 2005-2007, many of the people who might otherwise be changing the world were a.) working for hedge funds or b.) chasing social networking, casual gaming, or video startups because that's where the money was. It's only with the recent financial crisis that getting deep expertise has become fashionable again, because now there are no easy outs. But it takes a minimum of 2-3 years (some would say 10+) to go from "I'm going to change the world" to "I'm changing the world."
I must admit that I thought pg missed the ball on this one (he's usually spot on). He is right, content is something I don't need, but I usually want. Likewise, most things advertised alongside content is stuff I also don't need.

What makes content difficult to sell is that there is a business model around giving it away. This is due to one large reason: the cost of distribution of content on the internet approaches zero.

Now at this point pg may say, "exactly, because you were selling the paper before". No, not exactly, you were selling the content and the cost of distribution (which is a different thing). It's why I can't give away water with advertising on it. The cost of physically distributing it will eat into any profits I make on the advertising.

When you look at it from this position you see that nothing has really changed from the pre-internet days. You simply have the cost of production/distribution of a product versus its selling price + indirect revenue (advertising and such).
Not to mention survival situations. Not that it's something that happens on a daily basis, but did that stop you from learning CPR?

The double bowline is really useful to throw to someone as a rescue harness if you need to pull them up something, and being able to tie a one-handed bowline is useful if you need to tie a rescue harness around yourself.

(Boy Scouts ftw)
I agree with you PG completely. There was another blog post by Albert(USV) http://continuations.com/post/190217323/the-web-and-educatio... about missing scalability solution in education, where content is extremely expensive. It is going to change very soon.
This may be of interest: http://feedblog.org/2008/01/18/sublime-text-high-level-navig...

I don't know how easy it would be to integrate into an existing text editor though. Firstly, the rendering itself. I do it via using the GPU to render textured quads, to get trilinear filtering without a big load on the CPU. Without this filtering, the quality goes out the window: standard font rendering algorithms don't render fonts nicely at tiny sized.

The other issue is performance: consider a large file, and just scrubbing up and down with the scroll bar. With the minimap, you have to be able to render thousands of lines of text efficiently, to keep scrolling smooth. I built the rendering structure around this requirement, and I suspect without a lot of attention, typical text rendering code wouldn't be able to layout and draw the text fast enough. Then again, it's not so bad if you would be happy to accept a few limitations, such as fixed width fonts and no soft word wrapping.
Yes, I also believe this is related to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=727396
Brad, let's get together
CTRL-ALT-DEL: I may have invented it, but Bill Gates made it famous...
Gene cure for colour blindness
American cities are designed around the automobile. The rare American city that's designed to be beautiful (Portland, for instance) is impossible to drive in, while cities that can be driven in are almost necessarily inhuman sprawl.

You'd think that, as a trade-off, American cities would be usable for motorists. But traffic congestion is such a big problem that it's impossible to build a city to satisfy even that requirement.
They have to remember not everyones in startups to change the world. I don't think many here would be to upset if all they ended up with a $170 million exit.
Will iPhone Conquer The Enterprise? 428,000 Search Results Point to Yes
Please note that "virtually never" is weaker than "never". In any case, thanks for your input. Your misguided fanboyism greatly amuses me...
Is the old Kirk's hamburger joint still there? Wonderful place.

(This is dating me--haven't been back there for 20 years.)
You're... kidding, but I had to think about it.
How Pitance Versions Documents in CouchDB
The article references the judges' comments. The credibility you measure should be that of the judges.
This article refers to the judges' opinions.

Your rebuttal is ad hominem (DH1: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html).
Investor: What are you building?

Entrepreneur: Artificially intelligent software that automatically builds sophisticated business applications based on the enterprise's business rules.

Investor: Your competitors are too entrenched. What can you do that's simpler?

Entrepreneur: Small business software that ties all a company's applications together.

Investor: You'll never compete with Microsoft. What else?

Entrepreneur: Tiny apps that all kinds of people can use to run their stuff.

Investor: 37signals will kill you. What else?

Entrepreneur: Social software that enables your sales people to understand what's happening in the global marketplace.

Investor: It'll never work. Can you do something more practical?

Entrepreneur: An intelligent e-commerce system that guarantees the consumer the best value.

Investor: You'll never compete with Amazon or Ebay. Got any other ideas?

Entrepreneur: Recipe software.

Investor: OK, if that's the best you can do, we'll go with it. Geez, I just wish you guys would dream a little bigger.
1.2bn population of India to be given biometric ID cards
The article is also an opinion piece by Sarah Lacy, not just straight-up reporting.
I like this thoughtful example. Problem is, like what you've outlined, 90% of this conversation happens in the entrepreneur's head which is precisely the complaint!
I'm fine with non-lame non-hacking posts, by any author. Most life/computer-hacking stories posted here are formulaic and sad. This brief slice of humanity far exceeds the average story.
Scientists Build Anti-Mosquito Laser
I was one of those disagreeable kids who used to argue with teachers when they got their math or chemistry wrong, and eventually I stopped doing that

That's depressing. That's what education is supposed to be about (rather than blindly accepting incorrect facts).
Industry Collusions We’d Like to Throw Down a Black Hole
Yes.

Edit: This is being downvoted, maybe because it seems out of context now. If it isn't clear, this was in response to a comment that was later deleted.
I remember reading this article when it was originally posted last year and thinking that it makes sense for 37S to skip Photoshop mainly because they already have a strongly defined, common visual style for their web apps. I get that the 37S visual style could be seen as "not doing any graphic design" and I assume this is meant in an at least partially facetious way, so don't worry, I get the joke and the serious point contained within it. I am however happy to stand up and say that I am one of those who likes the bare visual style that 37S pioneered.

But none the less, skipping the non-functional mock-up stage does not make so much sense for your average (say, freelance) web designer/developer who is directly servicing multiple clients, each of whom expects a completely different visual style for their website. I remember following a link (somehow connected to this 37S post, maybe in the comments or something) to this post:

http://www.pixelhavenllc.com/weblog/designers-who-skip-photo...

And thinking that sums it up pretty well for me.

As often seems to be the case, some people think that what 37S says works for them should invariably work for everyone else without modification and if it doesn't, then that somehow invalidates any value that their advice may have had. o_0
Joshua Bloch, http://www.scribd.com/doc/33655/How-to-Design-a-Good-API-and..., I believe had as one of his rules: "Example code should be Exemplary" (I don't see it in the slides, but it was in the video as I recall)

Sample code lives forever; make sure you get it right!

Of course, I didn't go to the primary sources for the article, so I could be completely wrong about the situation.

edit: While I really like clojure, that isn't all its syntax, less macros. There's stuff like ` #() _ etc., although two out of three of those examples are shorthand for things you can do with the syntax he listed (quote and fn). I think you could easily fit it on a page, though.
The chief problem with this is that most programmers' intuitions are calibrated for single threaded processes; when they think of "what could happen" race conditions and deadlocks aren't there. This, I think, is because they are usually emergent global properties, not localized errors, and we're not used to looking for those or, frankly, especially good at them.

There's a very simple way to prevent all deadlocks and race conditions. It's called in some circles the "Global Interpreter Lock" which converts the system from concurrent to single threaded, and is usually the wrong way to deal with the problem. These locks become performance hurdles over time, and people try to replace them with finer grained locks, and what happens every time is that mysterious and weird concurrency errors happen, sometimes for years, until things finally get ironed out. Happens in Python, Linux kernel, and probably a million other places I'm not immediately familiar with.
> - No out-of-the-box feature for opening remote files, especially SFTP. ....

> - No code folding. .....

> - Configuration and preferences .... a GUI for that.

> Give me those features and I'll be happy to shell out those 60 bucks.

FWIW the Zeus editor has these features: http://www.zeusedit.com
Twillage helps you find local events from twitter
We just opened Twillage, an event aggregator that mines twitter for local events and groups them by date and location. Let us know what you think. info@twillage.com
I agree that the comments shouldn't offend anyone.

I disagree with your reasoning, though. This neighborhood is (apparently) pretty well known in Ye Olde Silicone Valley(e). That being the case, I'll bet any number of nerd bloggers or private individuals could have written it up and gotten upvotes; perhaps not as many, but that's not a problem unless you dislike the idea of reputations in general.

The other factor to consider is this: that the people upvoting are aware that PG has more clout than the average poster, are aware that this is a slightly less-hackerly story, and are upvoting it because they approve of the additional attention PG can help bring to it.
Previously, a Zune would at best be wedged underneath this table’s short leg to keep it from wobbling.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html