skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pointing him to some other place where his luck is likely to be better. It may or may not be a black hole, but at least he's out of this black hole. And stops bothering us on top of that. Win-win.
Real player - Ask.com Search
I have a Mac. So can i install the Windows 7 Upgrade? Does "Upgrade" means that i need to have a windows in order to install it ? or it doesn't matter?
Google chrome 3 support themes, try them today
Yes, that is true. But in an election the people that vote normally have some kind of interest in the outcome of the vote.

To ask a large number of outsiders who have otherwise no interest in the vote to come and vote for you to me seems to make the whole thing into a popularity contest, whoever has access to the largest communities will win the vote, regardless of the merit of the various candidates.

I don't think it is 'proper' to use the HN audience as a way to swing a vote one way or the other. But that's just my feeling, and judging by the moderation so far I'm in the minority with that ;).
Mint Is Yodlee’s YouTube
"people realize it's actually pretty much a mini macbook"

You forgot the "some" at the beginning of the sentence ;-)

I doubt the non hacker crowd recognizes anything of the kind!they probably think of the IPhone as the "cool mobile phone" ( a deserved reputation imo)
There was some work recently to improve the performance of persistent data structures. See http://clojure.org/transients

Calling (transient x) gives you a mutable copy of x which is created in O(1) time. You can then use functions like conj! and assoc! to modify the data structure in place. When you've finished, call (persistent! x) which returns you to a pure data structure (another O(1) operation).
Actually, I'm not too opposed to meta-discussion on HN. It does serve a purpose and I have argued in favour of it in the past.

But I do see opponents point that meta-discussion tends to get very repeating after a while and even self-serving. The latter is the reason I flagged this submission. It isn't so much the feature request, or the "when should submissions be changed" discussion, but the simple "boohoo somebody changed MY submission boohoo THEY SHOULDN'T!"
> And stops bothering us

I think that should read 'stops bothering me'. Everybody here speaks for themselves, so do you. By using 'we' you assume that he was bothering me, and everybody else here too, and in fact he wasn't, though there may be many more people that sympathize with you.
I think it's too long for me to read at the moment ;)

For a lot of the web based ones (including the site I mentioned) you do not need a GM, it is arbitrated by the computer.

It also works a lot quicker and is more user friendly than PBEM.
I'm using my personal wordpress blog as an open id provider (works with other websites so I know I've got it set up correctly) but that doesn't seem to work.
> If you say something I don't like, I can sue you and you have to prove that every tiny detail of what you said is factual.

Personally I don't have a problem with that. After all, you have to be very sure that you can win otherwise you're going to have to pay my legal fees, face a potential counter-suit, and worst of all, have your reputation tarnished even further. The thing is, people should be checking their facts before publishing them to a wider audience. Also, I'm pretty sure that courts are open to the idea that sometimes terms and phrases can be interpreted ambiguously. "Tiny mistakes in delivery" is of course relative, but it's unlikely that the courts will rule in favour of the plaintiff where their case is clearly frivolous.
pretty pretty please
We should not draw conclusions on the enforceability of the patent by the out-of-court settlement. Microsoft is perfecly capable of doing so to give money to the patent holder in order to hurt its competition.
Well, let me take a harsher stance than you and call BS on his 'that is not hyperbole'. Most homeless people are rather miserable, if not about their immediate situation or their worries about the near future, then about the psychiatric diseases at least half of them are suffering from. Being homeless is hard and anyone that has taken any trouble to know something about homeless people knows that these romantic notions are utter BS. Being homeless is easy as long as you have the ability to fall back on a home, a fund, family, etc. Most homeless people do not have that option.
Heavy-handed moderation is worse than no moderation at all.
Ok, that does seem to work if you leave the facebook page to refresh itself.
I think the light-bringer's saying that, if we extend the analogy between computer language constructs and real-world stuff, we should remember that sometimes people do stuff, and sometimes we don't do stuff.
Alright, but that's far from buying a Caribbean island, which was being discussed too.
Residential streets are not designed for throughput. You make city-planning sound one-dimensional.

Maybe you don't have children.
Is there any way to tell from the outside and at this point in time if the deal is a takeover from the inside like Apple buying Nexxt?

Will the lead people at Mint have real power in Inituit? Will one of them be the next CTO? Are terms like those ever specified in a buyout?
Response to new proposed Hitchhiker book
I don't know, most talent contests with public voting have no impact on the voters either. They vote for whoever they liked best, or which act they liked best, or who had the hottest singer, or who shouted "vote me" the loudest.

I think it is relevant to HN because its an interesting article about a company founded by a regular HN member. Asking people to vote at the end of the article seems fairly natural to me.
Easy solution: don't care so much. There's so much velocity now that your posts will soon be buried unlikely ever to be seen again.

hn is a fun and uplifting place to come on break. The moment anything about it turns negative for you, log off, go code something, and come back tomorrow. We start over every day.
In one word: "horrible".

As for Outlook, it seems to be a de facto standard mail clients try to emulate. I would much rather use a Gmail-is interface. Labels are a much better idea than folders.
Google's corporate culture: Creative tension
duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828992
Yep, that's it. Hop on the T, get off at the Charles/MGH stop, and walk across the footbridge to the Esplanade. They're open until the end of October, so you've got another month of good sailing left for this year (dress warm!).
They are both a part of my repertoire also. The trucker's offers a great "quick and dirty" mechanical advantage for tying things down on your car, on your boat (my mast when I trailer it, for instance); heck I even use it to tie down my trash-can lids to keep the animals from getting into the trash (raccoons, not bears!).
Do you really consider that a useful analogy?

Cheap cars are useful. A super liquid stockmarket is a zero sum game in which everyone is encouraged to participate but a few sharks basically have extra cards.

Its really not obvious why such a responsive market is necessary, it is simply said to be a good thing and a progression, yet it moves at speeds that clearly do not reflect the underlying fundamentals.
Japan scientists create 3-D images you can touch
I'm happy to not get down-modded below 10 points anymore if I say something critical about the US president.
I think you're on to something here. The core of this is probably that HN is different things to different people. You see it as a place to come on a break, and then it wouldn't matter much to you whether or not you got 'misrepresented' somehow. In this case it wasn't that important, but in the more general case to have your words changed is not good, especially without a trace that that is what happened.

I see HN as a completely different place than you do. I see it as a place to meet people that are interested in the same sort of thing that I'm interested in (at least I hope so), which means that if I were to be misrepresented somehow by some anonymous editor that it would make a huge difference to me.
RAID's Days May Be Numbered
Ever install Skype for the Mac? They actually have a link to the Applications folder in their .dmg, and a little arrow icon to show exactly what you have to do. It's pretty sweet.
Google is Your Friend. Check out the downtown sailing center, http://www.downtownsailing.org/ . $245 per season for a crew membership.
Learn cloud security before it's too late
Thanks. I wanted to create a blog with name "1-world" but I got an email saying that

"We were unable to post your email:

create a blog to site: 1-world.posterous.com because this site does not exist."
From what I read, it took quite a long time. Between one and three months, depending on the person. I guess three months would be pretty painful. I've never tried it personally, so...
"Will the lead people at Mint have real power in Inituit? Will one of them be the next CTO?"

Very unlikely. And even if someone from Mint were to become CTO, he would find it very difficult to change direction or focus. Intuit has multiple levels of management fiefdoms(within fiefdoms) and is infested with layers of clueless middle management and with a few honorable exceptions(mostly old timers from the old days, and some sharp kids just out of school, who don't stay very long) the tech people aren't very hot either (which is why, with all their resources and customer base and domain knowledge, they couldn't compete with a thin layer around Yodlee's backend).
I just wrote a study that said the leading cause of Death, was Birth. Challenge that!
The duplicate detection should be improved, I have posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830030 and it ended up being a duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828992 (the only difference is my entry pointed to the www cname)
Yeah, the various nerd meetups around here never seem to get much traction. Not sure why that is. Maybe too many of us family guys.
Maybe it's my programmer's mindset... I never really understood why flash trading is such a problem. If I buy a stock, and you buy a stock the next hour, is it a problem? What if I buy half an hour before you? A minute? A second? A us? Where do you draw the line? Why would you draw the line?

To me, it seems like a scrub argument. Note the usage of 'cheating' and 'fair' in this thread and article.

> Critics say flash orders favor sophisticated, fast-moving traders at the expense of slower market participants.

Why shouldn't someone who moves fast have an advantage?
Interesting read.

There was that guy (though I cannot remember who it was) who claimed to have sustained polyphasic sleep for 9 months and only stopped it because he found it hard to interact with people and socialise because his schedule was too different from everyone elses. But, I have no evidence, so.. that FAQ seems reasonable though.
$170 million is a lot of money ? Never mind ...
I can't have a list of a million integer pairs take 160MB of RAM.

This doesn't have much to do with sharing. Rather, it is the overhead of boxing the integers.

If you want a byte array that you'll interpret as an array of machine integers (as an int * would be in C), then you need to use that type instead of a "list of integers" that your language provides. That "list of integers" is optimized for something other than space (integer math not overflowing, O(1) insertions, etc.). Conversely, arrays of machine ints have many annoying quirks, but the underlying hardware can process them really quickly, and they are very frugal with respect to memory use. (No overhead, basically.)

As it stands now, most language implementations are not smart enough to see that you just used lists because you like the syntax, but meant to use byte arrays. (Or, you used Integers instead of ints.)

Tracemonkey, GHC, and probably other languages have code to help optimize this case. dons wrote a nice article about how GHC's codegen produces code that uses unboxed types even though the programmer used boxed types.

As far as I know, Clojure is not really smart enough to optimize much right now (beyond the JIT that the JVM does), so this is probably a problem. The solution is to fix Clojure or to use the native types. I don't know how to do this, as I don't use Java or Clojure, but it sounds like a Simple Matter Of Programming to expose a shared array of unboxed integers. (There are a lot of papers on this.)

Functional programming is a "new idea" in terms of people using it for "Real Work", so there is a long way to go in terms of writing excellent optimizing compilers. It is getting better very quickly, though.
Tiny Raptorex lived long before T. rex
Lunar orbiter begins long-awaited mapping mission
I don't understand what these people are trying to achieve. The book has been commissioned by the people who own the rights, it's being launched in October, has been announced, so it's already been written.

Add to that the fact that it will be a moderate to huge money spinner, and they already know that there will be people rabidly opposed.

What's the point?

And why is this Hacker News?
Did you come up with the idea of writing Getting Real and then try to market it and sell it to web developers? Or did you gather the content of your book from your blog posts, bundle it into Getting Real and up sell it to your readers?

What's the difference?

From what I can see, 37signals came up with the idea of writing a book called Getting Real and marketing it to web developers. But they came up with the idea very slowly and incrementally by starting out with one post on a blog, observing the response, and working up from there.

It's positional chess. Yes, the checkmate on move 37 is caused directly by the pawn move at move 1. But that doesn't mean that the chessmaster planned move 37 all along. The chessmaster started out with a plan to make money ("win this game") and then made strong moves that led in winning directions, refining as the game proceeded.

37signals has had a mechanism for translating developer attention into cash from day one: Selling developer project-management tools. What's disingenuous about that?
Took a bit of googling, but what do religious fundamentalists have with ddt?
How to Deal with Client Dissatisfaction
No more Windows Mobile phones from Palm
Many thanks - it's worked fine. I can even get the recipe to work on my machine, although I ahve to hand insert the path the the executable I built from source. That's a mystery, since I did do a "make install" but it seems that the version found on the path isn't that one.

Don't you love computers?

Anyway, the result of this should be announced here in a few days. I hope it's worth the time I, and indeed we, have wasted.

Thanks.
What does this have to do with HN? Political, biased, and uninteresting.
Apple - iPod nano - Kenmerken - Videocamera
This is a threat: authorities say this sort of thing to get the interested parties around that table to talk. This does not make the service out-of-touch, just it gets people to take notice. This strategy worked with the Blackberry, the company agreed to work with the security authorities.

What this means for privacy though is a different matter.
To fasten your seatbelt, insert the flap into the buckle
Clenbuterol
Clenbuterol or Clen - The Hollywood’s Secret Skinny Pill – which was recently published in many magazines.
Schneier on Security: Modifying the Color-Coded Threat Alert System
Well, I have played around with this for some time and I found that boxing is just one reason. Another one is that clojure structs seem to always act as generic maps even if only predefined elements are actually stored. This seems like an easy one to optimize.

But if I put lots of structs in a Java ArrayList, memory use goes down significantly, so clojure vectors are much less efficient regardless of boxing.
Thanks for posting this. I was peripherally aware of 50Cent's entrepreneurism (the Vitamin Water deal), and I had no idea he was so focused and driven.

> The fools in life want things fast and easy — money, success, attention. Boredom is their great enemy and fear.

PG's build something people want

> Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the audience for their idea. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the appropriate supply

Launch before you're done

> Do not be afraid of people’s criticisms - without such feedback your work will be too personal and delusional.
Ok, but that has nothing to do with memory usage, which is my problem with clojure.
Ok, that changes matters, but not entirely.

It looks like Vodafone is actually using you to give exposure to their contest. A bit like the 'myminicity.com' website that was crazy popular for a while, with everybody spamming just about every place they could find with links to 'their' city. Only in this case it is your contest entry which might actually have some use instead of a bunch of numbers in a table somewhere.

What they are gauging with this as well is how big a userbase you can mobilize to decide which party is the best at marketing their product in ways that do not cost vodafone $.

And effectively by asking people to come and vote for you, you are not only promoting your own product, but also the vodafone contest and the vodafone brand without any cost to them.

Pretty clever of them.
It's a little ironic that HN is not particularly responsive to feature requests from the community... in contrast to how YC recommends startups be run.

There's that idea that appropriate profit motives are an important way to make things happen. Therefore, one way to make HN more responsive to requests would be to make it into a startup. Not that that should happen.
Yeah, we're getting ever closer to the era in which:

- you step out to home depot to buy a $20 hammer

- when you get there "The Flash" (of dc comics fame) figures out you're looking to buy a hammer and buys all the $20 hammers

- he leaves a post-it note saying "if you want a hammer meet me in aisle 7"

- you get there and he offers to sell you a $20 hammer for $21

- either you buy it or you don't; once you've made your decision he returns either (N-1) or (N) hammers back to the store (30 day return policy and all that)

- if you head over to lowe's instead well he is "The Flash"

Not an exact metaphor for "flash trading" (as sketched it's riskless) but it's imho a relevant thought experiment.

At the individual level the winners and losers are pretty obvious. At the systemic level it's unclear any actual efficiency is gained; differentiating between actual "efficiency gains" and "red queen" scenarios is tricky.
10 Model-Worthy Yoga Poses - PAGE 2
Shorter Derek Sivers (at least every Derek Siders post that ever makes it to HN): "Hey, everyone, I'm rich and can do whatever I like. Isn't it great being rich? It's so much better than not being rich. Why doesn't everyone do it?". (Only with more boldface.)

(I took a look at his blog, including some posts that I didn't see on HN. Perhaps it's only 1/2 or 1/3 of his posts that have that form. But it does seem to be those that get onto HN.)
Yes, software we use should make smart suggestions based on our basic usage patterns, but not decisions. Good point.

Bernstein misunderstands Seth's calendar example: defaulting to PM when I select 2 o'clock is definitely not the same thing as changing my 2AM entry to 2PM automatically. In that straw man example, the "smart" feature is actually a bug.

What I took from Seth's post is not that software should be able to read our minds, but that opportunities to delight our users abound, especially in features/functions that we would consider trivial.
Things to ask before you redo your website
Perhaps because it's timely, relevant, and science-based.
5 axis milling machine making engine block:

http://video.stumbleupon.com/?/#p=5zkc5myej9
news.arc is open-source, right? So if you want a feature, just add it.
I get the sense that Paul isn't terribly interested in patches either. (After having sent one and not hearing back.)
Patent squatting is based on the idea that settlement out of court is cheaper for the company being sued. Settlement doesn't mean much, period.
> I don't understand what these people are trying to achieve.

Not much, it's just that, unfortunately Douglas Adams died way too young and that every time someone releases another book that carries his name somewhere on the cover you get your hopes up for another glimpse of the masters wit and insight only to be disappointed.

> And why is this Hacker News?

it isn't. But by commenting on it you make it so ;)
If jasonfried is right that Intuit will ruin Mint (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829502), it opens an opportunity for a Mint copycat to use the same Yodlee back-end to fill the gap created.
Shannon's "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" is hardly a 'paper'. It's a thesis towards Shannon's MSc.
TDD on crack
Acorns are a tripping hazard? I have never been especially graceful, I have lived under oaks for about half the last thirty years--including at least four that were astonishingly productive of acorns, and bless me if I've ever tripped on an acorn.
...machine learning is hard...

Hard is relative. I remember Seth's post and pretty much agreed with all of it. Nothing in it struck me as particularly difficult or unusual. We routinely do these things all the time:

- provide options in most likely order
- default to the most likely option
- auto-complete based on indexed options
- auto updating software
- auto maintaining databases

Users don't necessarily want more "features". They just want their software to work the way they do. The developer's job is to find that out and make it work, no matter "hard" it is to do.
Thanks for letting me know more bits about Prof. Shannon's works, they are just ... beautiful
The CodePlex Foundation; Why is Microsoft founding it?
I think #6 is used to keep people down. If the overarching principle of FOSS included #6, how far would it have gone?

I suspect that many people experience meltdowns in their personal lives, because they start generalizing rule 6 from their professional lives and let it guide their personal lives.
When you're working for yourself, you're still working for your customers.

This notion that working on a fulfilling business can meet all of a person's needs is false.

Working on something fulfilling, for money is good. Having the option of doing something fulfilling that doesn't need to make money is better.

So, back to the OP's point: FU money is better than a happy income (depending on what you have to do to get to the FU stage).
Simple Webhooks with Clojure and Ring
What's the name of your gopher server software?
Hackers want features -> they are ignored -> they learn arc and submit patches themselves -> ... -> arc becomes the dominant programming language. Definitely an arc conspiracy.

Seriously, it's just a small non-commercial niche news site with basic functionality. People running it have more interesting stuff to spend their time on. I wonder if reasonable proposed patches are accepted.
Cisco vs dimdim
Isn't Aaron Patzer taking a fairly high-ranking job inside Intuit (as head of "personal finance software" or something) once the acquisition closes?

If this was an acquisition fueled completely by a VC or investor, I doubt the founder would be interested or willing to then commit to the Big Evil Company that his revolution is being sold to.

Therefore I think the main premise of Jason's blog post is wrong.
Ooh, I am over half as old at HN :) I feel old, at least in website years. What was it called before hacker news?
Those of us who've been around the tech industry will recall that Yodlee started out as a front-end like Mint and migrated into being the back-end provider when that didn't work out.

So, it was a distinct choice on their part to go for the back end and abandon the Mint-like interface.

And they weren't alone in trying to be Mint in 1999/2000. Anyone else remember ezLogin? IIRC they had an exit of around $120m in 2000.