skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A week of FP heaven - a rundown of ICFP 2009
Sometimes [FreeBSD] ports make me cry
Better than on a bike where you're tangled up to start with.
...and we lefties are still screwed...
How To Get a Job [at a Rich Internet Applications Company]
I believe the problem stems from a misconception on both sides of the table. What passes for design in the software world is little more than what an architect might sketch on a napkin over dinner.

The code is the design. What other deliverable of the software development process contains the precision and specificity of a blueprint, which can then be followed to actually build (the double entendre is no coincidence) the thing?

A contractor equates to a compiler, albeit an expensive, time-consuming, and buggy one.

I don't think clients are so much to blame... it's just that software is so abstract and a house so, shall we say, concrete. We need to do a better job of helping clients understand and visualize what we are doing.
Folks interested in this subject should read this very fascinating blog:

http://33bits.org/

(The title comes from the factoid that 33 bits of information is enough to uniquely address any living person. After reading through a few practical examples I'm convinced: anonymity is an illusion.)
A big part of it was that most of them were still uncertain about the whole email thing. It's not an exaggeration to say that some of them didn't know how to use a spreadsheet.

They have an irrational fear of technology, and it may be because they believe nonprofits should be modeled after the 60s and 70s counterculture-based nonprofits where technology was distrusted as being a tool of the Man (a lot of money was poured into computers via AI funding, defense grants, etc).

It is awful and sad that they would not use Urbantastic because it sounds like a great idea.
I really liked the intuitive nature of your design work space. Rarely do you see a DIY graphic/layout space that is easy for the general end user to use. I was trained as a designed to use Illustrator and I feel like most online tools try to emulate the Adobe work methodology. But with your approach you have made it easy for everyone to understand the basic tool set of move, rotate, and scale. Well done.
Best Hot collection of Free Icon Sets By VisualPharm
Empiricism says: no. Neither necessary nor sufficient.
This also applies to any form of web design.
The one biggest take-away, which I wish had a reference, though it's self-supporting by example, is that we recognize letters by their tops, not their bottoms.
Less, actually.
and I believe its going to have the same problem: http://paulgraham.com/segway.html
I don't agree - usually the simple metrics are not actionable because they are in the vein of "uniques per month" which is not something you can direct act on.

Specific metrics (breakdown down uniques by cohort, behavior, etc) are actionable, but end up being complex to describe and collect.
Basically an ad for a Hadoop conference in NYC; no technical content here.
Ask HN: Hotel Booking Hacks?
Curious to know if anyone here uses any clever techniques to get the best/cheapest hotels possible. Is there anything better than just using Kayak?
My Mom is a third grade teacher, and they recently stopped teaching cursive writing for many of these reasons.
>>There are plenty of alternatives around, but I don't have to propose alternatives to be able to criticize something.

You can't list an example that has worked for a big population in an industrialized world -- and given them an open society.

It seems like complaints that someone should do something about cancer, because it isn't nice.

The problem is how -- just complaining that the world could be better is not really interesting (I expect better on HN).

>No, I didn't say there is no alternative and I didn't preach.

But on a direct question, you had no alternative.

You really seem emotionally involved and complain about the world system, which you would probably have to kill a large fraction of the world's population to change.

>Are you a fatalist?

Read what I said -- do tests of different organizational models but far from where I live, please. The failure modes are too scary.

[Edit: I am not joking, to run a society with an untested economic system and nudge it along seems like doing brain surgery on yourself. In addition, left wingers seem too much like a cult of true believers to be pragmatic, then you get a "strong man".]

If you really want to find my opinion, google for "democratic peace theory" and "resource curse".

The countries not opening up and embracing capitalism and good governance are the ones with problems. They are either oil countries ("free" money for the controlling junta) or poor dictatorships with high walls, big oceans and really poor population (Syria, North Korea, Cuba, etc). Modern monarchies, if you will.

For countries with capitalism and good governance, it is a question of time until their problems are solved.

>>that's due to medical and technological progress which does not depend on capitalism

Again, capitalistic models [Edit: added previous word] was needed for industrialization, afaik.

And the US health care system is even more fscked than my local European one. (Is health care the reason why Americans are fleeing to Cuba in droves?)

Edit: Changed an "or" to "and", "as" to "than".
Even the MBAs I know say not to bother with the MBA.
> I use bash, despite its shortcomings for the pure reason of portability. I can rest at night knowing that the next unix machine I use, will almost certainly have bash installed somewhere

No, bash isn't standard at all. It's usually installed on Linux, but BSDs and other Unices don't have it installed by default, and not all Linux distros have it either. (Off the top of my head: OpenWRT.) The standard is sh, the bourne shell. It's a pet peeve of mine -- it's really annoying to port things that use bash internally for no reason.
I'm actually a fan of deploying ideas for free, assuming one can afford the luxury of giving a potentially money-making idea away.
So, how do you know if anything you buy was not stolen at some point in the past?

For big-ticket items (cars and houses), official systems of title help. For other items, there's not certainty, as with the world in general you achieve relative confidences with the best info you have. (And, buying from reputable sources means you may have a claim against them for recovery of your payment even if the stolen property is returned to its rightful owner.)

How does it work if the insurance has paid out after the theft?

Insurance is a separate contract between the victim and a third party, the insurance company might be the legal owner, or want its claims payment returned.

See elsewhere in this thread, the situation is not as clear as you make it out to be.

I would certainly agree that it's complicated across jurisdictions and circumstances, but your statement -- "according to the law that person is now the rightful owner" -- remains generally false as you wrote it and bad advice in the USA.

Also, the world is a lot larger than just the US.

That is why I specifically said 'most' 'US' jurisdictions. What qualifiers -- jurisdictions and circumstances -- should have been included in your statement to make it true?
To get a better picture of the whole, there is other material available:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwmills/ANALOG.NOTEBOOK/klm/klm.h...

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/b443/notes/EmptySpace.pdf
Huh! Thanks.
Why we moved away from “the cloud” to a “real” server
Three More Reasons as to Why Google Should Defend the Anonymous Cowards
I keep a logbook and write down everything I do (well, everything work-related) in it.

Looking at it now, I see that I mostly print -- my letters almost never join up. I'm really not convinced that joining letters together saves any time at all.
Why and How to Write a Blog: Questions on Hacker News
First off, I think your concept is brilliant and there's a lot of potential. To me, this is one of those markets that should be targeted at women/moms (see the recent HN post on Ravelry). My wife and her friends were actually just talking about this very need yesterday ... they were looking for ways to put tree/bird designs on their wall.

That being said, here's where I think you can improve the execution:

1. Make the site a bit more feminine. Not really a fan of the blue background. Go something lighter, more neutral, maybe a little feminine. Maybe just white like an Etsy.

2. It's not immediately apparent that you can make and sell your own designs. If you're going for the Cafepress angle, I think you need some more obvious buttons/labels for that. At least make the "make" and "sell" buttons on top stand out better.

3. Add some more social/sharing features. Let women/moms create designs and share them with other users. Maybe you do it already, but let people save their favorite users, designs, etc. Again, look at Etsy for cues here.

4. Add a religious/spiritual category right away. As a Christian, trust me–if you have a category with bible verses and religious quotes, it would be a big seller. It's a huge market and I have tons of friends who would buy such graphics for their home.

5. The home page seems a little busy. I'm not sure what's most important to you, but I'd recommend some A/B testing to see what best improves your conversions.

Anyway, good luck with this. I think it has potential. I already showed my wife and she digs it.
For me, part of it has been realizing the actual cognitive reasons behind sales tactics (I was a sucker for buying wine at wine tastings up until a couple of years ago thanks to the reciprocation principle of sales), but part of it is realizing "I just don't need this."

You can't realize you don't need it, or won't use it, until you've bought something like it in the past, or as you say, you run out of room and think "do I really need something else here taking up space?"

The paradox is that I am now buying less as my income increases. The good thing is it puts me in a better position to buy a house, start a family, etc.
I find that after a little practice with typography, my handwriting moved to something similar to this naturally (including air joins when necessary).

I've recently worked a bit to reacquire my cursive skills, and as someone who practices both pretty fluently I'll vouch for italic as being easier to read and easier/faster to write.

My general handwriting is italic-form. I use block lettering, classic straight lettering, and cursive as various ways to denote headings and sidenotes.
Really, an MBA is only "necessary" for a middle-management position at a large corporation, where it's the standard entrance ticket. Everywhere else, you can get by without it. Clearly in technical circles, people see little value in the degree.

That's not quite the same thing as saying the the degree has no value though. I think the jury is still out on that one. I think it can be easily argued that "stupid business tricks" are an important area of specialty, with lots of subtlety. Not knowing those tricks is going to put your startup at a disadvantage in some situations (as other point out though, that probably doesn't include early stage development). And there's probably a lot you can learn in a classroom about that stuff. So I'm not going to condemn the MBA without evidence.
I jot notes or write them for other people all the time.
This article is really long, but if you can only read one portion of it, read this part about the 4 square worksheet:

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/page003....

It's a really interesting insight into how one experienced side in a negotiation can frame things to their advantage.
Ah, "higher desires" and "lower desires" is quite a judgment!

It is even more an extreme judgment when you are talking about what you think other people should do.

I am not saying that I disagree with you, necessarily. The problem is that human societies have evolved from smaller scale societies where "higher" and "lower" desires were well-defined by social consensus to the present large scale societies where there is no consensus definition of virtue however much it might be talked about.

I won't say that there's a solution here but we've got to take into account the problem...
It's actually easier to get an attractive slant with the Palmer method writing left handed with an overhook. Conceded that writing from underneath is tricky with the left hand, which is why I never learned to do it.
Incidentally, that 3D tag cloud makes me want to punch myself in the face.
I think you can get some idea of the effect by looking at the iPhone's competitors with more open development platforms.
Oracle should relax Sun's Java Community control grip
Sorry, what I meant to say was that the term was constant across both, and the monthly payment varied. So you can compare the monthly payments as a proportional representation of the total price. Where as the other commenter implied I got hoodwinked when the dealer lowered my monthly payment by lengthening the term.
Excellent list. I use all of those except the last, which is new to me and extremely useful--so, thanks! It's now aliased.

I find myself using the first two on an almost hourly basis.
I Have Bought Commission Blueprint 2Commission Blueprint 2.0
But just because some things couldn't be predicted, it doesn't discredit the whole field. For example, maybe it could be a scientific result that the stock market is unpredictable?

It also depends on what you mean by predicting. Does economics have to be able to predict the Dow Jones in 10 years to 5 cent precision to be acknowledged as a science? There are zillions of things to predict in the context of economics.

Also, mathematics is not a science by that definition?
I read a lot of articles that talk about programming being "low social status" or unappreciated.

I can't say that I see that in my daily life at all. Usually, when I'm around non-technical people, if I mention what I do at my job, or what some of friends do at theirs, most people are interested, and want to hear more.

Perhaps this is just an artifact of living in the Bay Area. Do others hear this same sentiment?

That being said, I think this article is right on about considering programming a craft, and is very well said.
This thread seems to have a discussion of sin and its antonym in various languages: http://www.yourdictionary.com/community/forums/viewthread/42...

This comment was funny: "A mathematician would have it as cosin, but that is going off at a tangent."
Metrics suck because they are indirect measurements, so by optimising the metric you may not be optimising what you intend. There's no reason why a more complex metric will necessarily be more directly aligned with a goal. This thinking suggests that by adding more complexity your metrics become more aligned, but it seems these patches could also take you further and further from anything real.
I started using it to build our app's web UI. Really like it, but because of maturity switched over to Flex for the time being.
In general I don't think it is the economists who tell you what stock to buy.
If Oracle wants to make Java more hackish they should open up it more to the community.

That would attract real hackers to program with Java and would improve the language too.
AWS Access Credential Rotation
How does it do that? At 20kmh I'll ride circles around this thing on my mountain bike with knobby tires wearing a 30 pound pack.
I'm considering using cappuccino for a startup idea I have, but the lack of people using it and info out there on it makes me a bit gun shy. It makes me think I'll spend more time hacking away with capp rather than focusing on delivering a product quickly to see if people like it. For anyone else out there considering using it do check out http://cappuccinocasts.com
The Ethics of Multitasking
I'm guessing that sailing off the front gets progressively easier the faster you're going. It's the graceful landing that presents a problem.
I bet I can go farther on my bike before stopping and eating than the Yike can go without stopping and recharging.
I also have this book and recommend it for anyone who wants neat, readable writing that is pleasant on the eyes, a combination that is really difficult to do with Palmer cursive.
I've spent a small amount of time working through the Cappuccino docs and tutorials, but never used it to build a project because it feels like it is so different from the typical JS I'm used to writing. That's not a criticism, just a description of the major hurdle I've encountered working with Cappuccino.

Instead of having a smattering of tutorials and example apps, what would be really help would be a set of real world problems and solutions to those problems using Cappuccino (a list of N perhaps?). It would be especially compelling if it could be shown that those problems are more elegantly or simply solved by the use of Cappuccino.
Developing a Process for Visualizing the Insanity
Hi, love the idea. Although I do like the design as a whole, I do agree that the colors should be more "neutral". Also the site is a little on the busy side and I think it would benefit from some more whitespace and less "this is ALL we do!!" in the homepage.

Oh and btw, I'm on Firefox 3.5 on Leopard and you ve got some nastiness going on on the footer. http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/7223/picture12h.png
Speech Given to Students by Obama
In an emergency, the thing in front is generally what I'm trying to avoid.
From my personal experience, there are a lots of work places that don't appreciate software developers.
Or in bash, using .inputrc (readline):

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
If your OS' scheduler sucks, make it better, instead of implementing your own scheduler.

You almost certainly know more about how you want your threads scheduled for your specific workload than the OS does.

Or you could go down the Solaris route with 170 different priority levels http://www.princeton.edu/~unix/Solaris/troubleshoot/schedule...
High time for a competing app distribution network for the iphone.

For those willing to jailbreak their phones, there is the 'Cydia Store':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydia_(application)#Cydia_Store
This works because you're in emacs mode, which gives you a bunch of other tasty shortcuts (http://www.scribd.com/doc/985254/Bash-Emacs-Editing-Mode-rea...) as well. There is an equivalent vi mode as well ("set -o vi").
Run Your Own Maven Repository With Nothing but an FTP Server
I get what they're saying about not flipping over the bars, but personally, I'd rather be able to bail out to the back or sides. The way they are describing basically just throws you into an object, whereas with the back/sides you're able to avoid objects and roll on the ground. If you're going fast enough to flip over the handle bars: (a) you're probably not going to be able to brake in time anyway, and (b) it's probably not much better to just get launched straight into whatever you're trying to avoid.
5 Last-Ditch Schemes to Avert Warming Disaster
User in One size doesn't fit all shocka!

it's really important to work the figures as seen in the article. We use EC2 but for certain scenarios we worked out that hardware would be cheaper. The bandwidth costs in particular can sneaky.

All that said I would be prepared to pay quite a premium for using Ec2, especially in conjunction with Rightscale, just for the shear convince and the ease with which we can re-configure and adapt.
The money an MBA costs would be better spent as seed capital to get something released! Even if your start up fails, it still could be cheaper than what you'd spend on the MBA and you'd have REAL experience.
Oh, I wasn't trying to imply that. I was just curious how you'd negotiated. People often "lose" when they're negotiating a monthly price versus walking into a dealership having already shopped for financing, and then negotiating a cash purchase price.

That said, if you pay cash for cars, I really don't understand the monthly prices in all of your posts. It just adds confusion.
I know this is quite old, but I would very much like to see an HN discussion about its contents.
In Sweden there was an initiative in the seventies to teach children to write like the author proposes. The reform didn't catch on very well though, in part since it's slower to write like that and in part due to teachers preferring the loop style.

These days it's up to the teachers (according to an article I read, http://hans.presto.tripod.com/metro000603.html [swedish]) which style to teach.
CSS is for design, HTML is for content - CSS Zen Garden
I mean both, actually. Not only did it have a fundamentally appealing design in every detail, but it was also (in the early days) a great opener!

"Ooooooo, is that the eye-Phone? Can I touch it? OMG, this ball-tilt game is awesome!" ;)
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycVLooZJhuw
The NASA Boom
Here's the Paul Ohm paper referenced therein:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1450006_code...
Extended warranties are fantastic if you get them from the manufacturer. I would recommend looking into those if you're ever shopping for a used car that's at or near the end of standard warranty.

Extended warranties that aren't backed by the manufacture aren't worth the money. The dealership going out of business isn't really relevant, though, as those warranties are "owned" and serviced by a third party warranty company.
On a unicycle, it's actually very easy to fall off the front safely- it basically dumps you back onto your feet. The posture and balance of the yike look comparable to me.
" The lack of storage space limits this to joy riding. You can't buy groceries, commute with a laptop"

People typically bike with laptops in backpacks and messenger bags.
Oh, dear.
Braces in general are great for all sorts of tasks. The general principle is that it duplicates arguments, with changes. Thus,

foo/bar/{a,b,c}

expands out to

foo/bar/a foo/bar/b foo/bar/c

and you can also use {1..9} to expand to all the numbers between 1 and 9 (inclusive).

Here are some ways I commonly use it:

- Create lots of subdirectories at once:

mkdir -p test/{a,b,c}/{1..4}

- Rename/copy files (as in parent comment)

- Removing lots of randomly named files, with common elements:

rm {a,d,f,gr}*

(this will remove all files starting with those prefixes...note that it will not delete other files starting with 'g', only those with 'gr')
open -a finder <dir> is a pretty handy way to open a finder window to current directory.
Wait, how is this any cleaner/better than a ternary statement? Beyond that the initial ugliness comes from using conditional markup in the first place. The only thing that is going to fix that is abstracting yourself from markup entirely.
you're already looking at HN, it's not like you're really gonna need that 25 for anything else right?

Actually, I did need that 25% for something else. Was waiting for code to finish compiling (well, for Clang's Static Analyzer to finish running). It takes more then a few minutes to run on a sizable project.

Plus, as jrockway pointed out, it absolutely kills battery life, and I'm on a laptop.
The only way we could increase our available storage was to increase the instance size.

I use Rackspace Cloud and have found other alternatives. If they just need more storage, Rackspace Cloud Files (similar to Amazon S3) would work (though it is not mountable to server instances). If they needed an infinitely scalable MySQL database for that historical data, they could use Rackspace Cloud Sites (similar to MediaTemple).

What's nice about Rackspace is that you can have Cloud Server instances, Cloud Sites (managed cloud hosting), Cloud Files, and dedicated Rackspace servers all in one place.
James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss (video)
When did HN become a forum for country dickwaving?
isn't this what they said about japan in the 80's? I mean, I'm not saying you are wrong, but I'm just saying that last time this happened we ended up buying our stuff back for pennies on the dollar.