skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of what makes it incredible is what an achievement it is for him. FTA:

Before each race, his feet are bandaged. He has lost toenails, and one ankle ligament is seriously sore.
"My feet blistered up terribly, then started healing when I shoved them in surgical spirit," says Izzard. "Then they reblistered because you've got new skin coming through.
"Blisters upon blisters are not very nice. It's the pain. Like the pain from mouth ulcers, it's not a massive area but sharp and quite agonising."

To be able to get up and run again day after day and put yourself through that is quite an accomplishment.

Also, by the end he was completing the marathons in around 5 hours, so it's not "a 10-hour marathon, repeated however often."

Lastly, I'm sure that soldiers go through a lot more training and conditioning than Izzard did, besides being younger. That said, if this story were about a soldier who ran 43 10-hour marathons in 51 days, getting up day after day and doing it despite experiencing the pain Izzard did, I would still be impressed.
Hehe, you are telling my hearts content. I think something along those lines need to be thwapped into the face of every designer and implementer of a new language:

- do not take away my vim for your puny IDE. I rather won't try your language than learn a new editor
- have a reasonable compiler out there which follows the guidelines to a compiler/interpreter interface on the command line: either "myLanguageCompiler program; ./program" or "myLanguageInterpreter program".
- get this reasonable standard compiler into the major linux repositories

Basically, all of these boil down to a single important point: Lower the entry barrier to your language considerabely, even to a point where things are just reasonable and not great for the new programmer.

Certainly, vim might not be good for editing (say) Lisp, and the standard compiler called (say) lisp or lispc might not be fast and efficient for everything, but I don't care about that if I just want to spend an evening toying around with the language.
just as important are users who DIDNT respond :) are you collecting that information?
Not only that but it looks incredibly underwhelming. It looks and smells so much like Java that you might as well use Java.
Fluctuations in supply over milliseconds aren't causing an inefficient distribution in resources though. There is an inefficiency here though in the extraction of wealth from the financial system without a corresponding input simply by making high-frequency transactions.

What resources were you thinking of?

The only resource I can think of that needs instantaneous variation in supply is electricity. Logistics of distribution mean that supply of most other things will only be variable on the order of 6 hours or so. Or do you mean supply of shares to be traded?

As an outsider, trading of securities and derivatives appears to be a long way from the initial goal of optimising the market and providing capital.

Thinking aloud: If trades were pegged to a single time each day (per market) how would that affect the goal of supplying capital (I'm guessing it wouldn't really)? It would reduce liquidity by quantising it in step with the market but would that be harmful?

I'm sure someone will point out to me why, beyond making traders less wealthy, that's a bad idea?
Claiming this will help reduce piracy is an asinine argument, virtually everyone in the UK pays for a TV License which means they've already paid for the content.
@When things are truly late-bound, it makes as little sense to split computational instructions into these "language" silos.

I can't understand you. Can you rephrase?

@Allowing users (and creating tools) to modify syntax is fundamental to breaking this tribal idiocy around "languages" as atomic sets of programming system design decisions.

It's far from tribal idiocy, and has more to do with modularity and substitutability. Most programmers do not realize what heights of engineering .NET|Mono, the JVM, Smalltalk, Symbolics Genera all are. .NET's MSIL, in particular, is the most modular stack-based assembly language I know of... especially version 2. It's pretty impressive once you realize you can specify modules at the assembly level. Granted, even in the '90s people were designing typed assembly languages, like TAL/T, which supported run-time code generation and could be certified for safety at compile time, link time and run time.

Really, I think talking about "not an acceptable Lisp" in broad strokes undermines attention to good engineering and striving to be great engineers.
Me too. I'm so busy with my head down in the code that I forget about these things. I wrote Sleep several years ago and am not as active on it because it's stable for my needs.
It´s just a survey, but one thing we can conclude by the data: those who earn more, "think" they are more happy. And those who earn less, "think" they are less happy.

The point is, what is happiness ? By these numbers, happiness comes from money and by my personal experience (could be wrong), happiness don´t have anything with money. Maybe joy, satisfaction and fun have, but not true happiness. So the article could be entitled as: The Self-Employed Are The Most Satisfied ... and not the happiest. Maybe the most happiest are priests, nuns and people who dedicate their lives to others. Guess the survey was ok, but the journalist behind the article was not happy in the way that he interpreted the research.
> He is doing a lot of damage to his body.

If you read the material kicking about from real doctors about this you'll see it's not the case.

It's fairly short term damage: in the long term he's going to see lots of benefits :) (edit: im not sure you could even call it damage, thety are just "flesh wounds". I bet some of us here have worse RSI from sat typing all day!)

The human body is incredibly resilient and it is often truely difficult to really seriously damage it in the long term.
I'm looking forward to the follow-up article about the Manhattan project, featuring "Robert Oppenheimer, the commie bombmaker".
maybe google thinks that economic investment will do more social good in china than just ignoring the market.
I felt the same, but I found it rather amusing and decided to submit it. Although I have to admit somewhere between those lines, there might be a shred of turth, if only a shred.
When to use an artificial field length
"Did I miss a lot of google announcements which are not solid projects?"

You mean like Wave?
Would you drop your AT&T iPhone for that?

Aren't iPhone users already selected for data rate insensitivity, considering the history of both the hardware product and AT&T's data performance?
No, I'm looking at it on a CRT display (model GT775 of the brand ViewSonic). It still works.
That's a really good idea Andy, and the gateway we're using in this particular case is primarily designed for restaurants (MercuryPay) so this would be commonplace for them.

I wonder though if its a faux pas to run the card at all without confirming first. I would be fairly upset if a merchant authorized my card (resulting in a hold) and I didn't complete the purchase, but if the authorization is for a short enough time I think this would be OK.

Also, a key function of the confirmation page is to minimize the number of invalid requests sent to the gateway, as too many bad requests can cause them to raise the rates.

I'm starting to think there is no PCI compliant way to store a CVV2 for any period of time whatsoever, but I'm also incredulous that so many brand name merchants would so wantonly violate the policy. Perhaps with enough volume and Level 1 compliance the gateway will make an exception.
Bipasha Basu Tops in Maxim Magazine's Hot 100 Celebrities
Ask HN: How accurate is Google Adword's Traffic Estimator?
I'm about to launch a startup, and plan to acquire users via search ads.

I'm using Google's Traffic Estimator to gauge how many users I can acquire in a month, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Also, I'm not sure if it includes Global or US traffic.

Does anyone have experience with this?

Here's an example of what I'm looking at:
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox?save=save&keywords=hacker%20news%0A%22hacker%20news%22%0A[hacker%20news]%0Ahacker%20newss%0A%22hacker%20newss%22%0A[hacker%20newss]&currency=USD&language=en
Reading that it sounds like his main feat was to keep running. If you do the math a 5 day/4 night race with 18hrs running a day by the other competitors gave him a 24 hour time advantage over them.

That's real endurance!
A great article but I wonder if it's actually aimed in the wrong direction.

While I own an AppleTV, and enjoy it, from the rumors it seems like the new Apple Tablet is aimed at being a portable media center, isn't it possible that these LP albums are actually made for that, to be viewed on the go or output to an HDTV through a dock connector?

I would love to see a great 3.0 AppleTV update, especially with the HTTP Streaming mentioned, but as time passes it seems less and less likely that Apple is going to overhaul the product again.
What exactly is "2.0" about getting publicity for a petition through traditional print and media outlets?
1. Don't look for a programmer. Get a developer or an engineer. If they don't know the difference between the two, that's strike one.

2. Use your network. People you know, even friends of a friend, are far more likely to be honest about their skills.

3. If it looks too good to be true, test it. Ask for previous works, ask how they would solve a problem, ask until you're convinced they can do the job.

4. Be clear about what you want done. Draw up mockups, outlines, concept of operations. The less the developer has to ad-lib, the less skilled they have to be to get the job done. I'd venture to say that most of the mixups developers make are due to requirement holes. If you know what you want, you can verify its done the way you want it done too.
There is a big difference between the proper cycle of "damage" and repair caused by proper training, and what this guy is doing.

He is overtraining. From the article it sounds like he may have stress fractures already.

Hell, I'll just forward this article to my athletic trainer and sports med friends and see what they say, and post their comments in a followup post.
Continental Contiextremecontact Tire Review | Tire Reviews
Also, you should really look at all the papers for COLA before saying it is a continuation of Lisp. Perhaps start with:

"Accessible Language-Based Environments of Recursive Theories (a white paper advocating widespread unreasonable behavior)". http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2006001a_colaswp.pdf.

The hallmark of COLA is recursive design, which sort of makes it more like Smalltalk than Lisp (but this is a fruitless point, and the key is to encourage you to dig deeper into what COLA is rather than what "it's like...").
You can see some warning at the top of the page...

Warning (512): Cache not configured properly. Please check Cache::config(); in APP/config/core.php [CORE/cake/libs/configure.php, line 663]

Warning (2): array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array [CORE/cake/libs/configure.php, line 684]

Warning (2): array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array [CORE/cake/libs/configure.php, line 691]

...
Terry Fox, a young man with one leg lost to cancer, ran ~23 miles a day for 143 days. What he did is almost beyond words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Fox
Good point, yes I am - It's not going into the live results but I'll put that data up too at an appropriate point.

(For the interested the short link points to a tiny Django web app that's doing both the tracking and handling AJAX e-mail uploads. Everything else is client side JavaScript.)
1. It wasn't the newspaper that reduced(?) Turing to "The Gay Codebraker". It was the petition campaign before it -- the campaign made him special among other gay (and non-gay) people who were discriminated.

2. If you think, that word "gay" is somehow humiliating -- invent a new euphemism instead of it, for political correctness sake!
I assume you're referring to the supposed lack of Tank Man photos on the Chinese version of Google Images. That's not the case: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen+square

Compare the results. There is 1 photo, compare that to
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen+square

Maybe this is a know your audience thing, maybe its censorship, I don't know.
That reminds me of that silly game Mediocrity by I think Dougas Hofstadter: Three persons write down an arbitrary number. The one with the middle number scores a point. After an agreed upon number of rounds (5 or 7 or so), the one with the middle number of points scores a set. After a number of sets, the one with the middle number of sets scores the match.
Google Docs 'widely used' at 1-in-5 workplaces
Even if the programmers you know are too busy to help out, then they can at least help with the search.

Job adverts and assessment questions written and reviewed by technical people look a whole lot different to ones written by the non-technical.
Ask HN: Anyone using PHP 5.3? Is it stable?
PHP 5.3 has been out for a few months now. I haven't heard any horror stories. I wanted to see what the communities experience has been. Does it seem stable and ready for production environments?
There's something bad going on here. This should have been flagged off the site, but there are four upvotes. Are there a group of users working together?
I suspect that the same thing will happen to the 2 hour marathon.

Really? http://www.sportsscientists.com/2008/10/15959-sub-2-hour-mar...
Hunger seems like a bad metaphor - having enough food, eating, being full, not being hungry, those are good things.

You don't lose your hunger, you satiate it, fix it, cure it.
Direct Evidence Of Role Of Sleep In Memory Formation Is Uncovered
Two types:

1) People worth paying attention to.

2) Whiny bitches.
Gov 2.0: the entire petition was online. This is part of the UK government's move to using the web. And BTW the code for the petition web site is open source.

Web 2.0: I made extensive use of Twitter, Facebook and my blog to get the word out (as did many others including Stephen Fry).
Analysis is good, but I disagree with the conclusion. If you don't use operator[], then you don't pay for it, and I'm not sure how often this really matters. If you cared about performance, you'd be using more references and fewer copies.
> I'm guessing - without further information - that some of these people are not aware they are crossing the line, or that they have very special arrangements with the CC companies regarding the machines where this is happening.

I think it has to be the latter. I would expect any good auditor would notice this and flag it, but perhaps I'm being naive.

> The rules are pretty straightforward, I've never been tempted to store CC information anywhere.

I agree. In this case we'll just skip the confirmation screen, possibly using JS to simulate one where its available. Its frustrating though, because I hate impacting the customer experience because of technical issues (especially in e-commerce).

> Most IPSPs (or at least the half decent ones) allow you to upload the registration form to their server. The idea is you pre-capture all the fields that you are interested in on a form on your site, the submit then populates the authorization via an underwater call to the server of the IPSP, then you redirect the user to your form on the server of the IPSP where they get their choice of credit cards and enter other sensitive information. That's where the final confirmation screen sits.

What's a good IPSP to use for this? Would we be able to mask the URL with one of our own, provided we buy our own SSL?

I've looked at PayPal's Direct Pay, Mercury Pay, and several others but haven't found one that provides a good user experience, allows us to mask with our domain, and allows the branding we need. FoxyCart.com looked promising, but they don't support users without Javascript, so that's a non-starter (and illegal).

>> We build a lot of e-commerce sites for clients, and our standard MO has been to send the data to the gateway immediately and never store it.

> That's the way to do it.

Thank you, very good to hear confirmation on this.

> Theory about how you could make this work: You could simply send all the data back in the form in hidden fields, show whatever you want to show (last four digits of card numer, no CVV), ask the user to confirm which re-submits all the hidden fields and then go to the IPSP for the transaction. That way you get your confirmation form and you do not store any data at all, it's either in the users browser (their risk) or underway to the IPSP, the only time it is on your server is the exact moment you pass it on.

This was actually the method we used during the initial build, just as a placeholder. But it just seems so inherently wrong.

My fear would be these pages being cached, and then the customer's CC info would be sitting on disk waiting for a piece of malware to find it. I know we could send a no-cache header, but I don't trust the browsers to honor the directive. And even though the risk would be offloaded to the user, we still want to avoid putting their data in harm's way whenever possible.

I really appreciate all your thoughts on this matter. I feel like this is a big blind spot for many online merchants, and is worth getting right.
Apple had little problem in doing that with PowerPC computers. The Mac Mini started its life as a cheap PowerPC G4 computer. It never was built to Sun workstation standards, but it's sufficient proof one can build a good enough SPARC-based workstation.

The current push towards OpenSolaris has generated a workable desktop environment that just screams for a relatively inexpensive (I will take Dell business desktop prices) SPARC system. And if they makes T1's (or 2's) in high enough volume, I bet they can sell them cheap enough.
I thought it was interesting to see a Google main page that wasn't so minimalist.
Marathons ARE damaging. Often permanently to some degree. Very long distance running is fairly stupid from a health perspective.

Top ten reasons not to run marathons:
http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html
Agreed.

And in the example case of the scuba shop, the author seems like he's complaining because the scuba shop operator didn't want to eat what he was being fed.

The article does make a good point though, in that in order to maintain a super high level of customer service you need to convince yourself that every potential customer counts.
a/b testing is a great tool, but wouldn't telling people they are participating in an a/b test trying to determine a specific question 'requesting e-mail addresses from visitors' bias the results?
I didn't invent the metaphor -- it's a hollywood thing -- but I like it.

Hunger implies starvation: you must do something in order to survive.

And it also covers what happens when you finally eat (grow a business) -- you stop being so hungry.

I think the really, really successful entrepreneurs are those who are as hungry with a billion dollars as they were with a buck-and-a-half. i.e., they never lose that hunger.
Well yes there is a better way. I was more commenting on the idea he was causing really bad damage. He certainly pushed the limit of physical endurance but it doesnt sound like he really broke it.

People racing to the South Pole regularly screw their feet up (with blisters, tears, ripped nails and all sorts) within a few days (or even hours). The foot is quite easily damaged and just as easily repaired :)

As to ligament damage I dont really know because Im not a serious "trainer" but I do cycle regularly and ligament damage I have done in the past has healed in a week or so.

On the other hand after a month or so of not cycling (say on holiday) I find a week of intensive work is great for retoning your body. This sounds like the same - just a little more extreme.
ridiculous_fish is posting again! (I guess this happened circa June)

He's had some excellent blog posts.
Beware of Kool Aid
I've never heard of Adam Baldwin, nGenuity's security person and presumably the impetus behind "evilpacket". He's ex-Symantec consulting; my cofounders cofounded @stake, which is now known as Symantec security consulting, and I don't believe it was ever their practice to make video demos of unpatched vulnerabilities.

I don't know enough about what's going on here to comment further, but I can say that nGenuity is going to find it hard to keep working with major vendors if they're going to actively screw over other vendors. Maybe that's not what they're doing here though.
This is exactly right. And given the somewhat simple nature of a product like Basecamp, I'm surprised that no cheaper, legitimate alternative has really popped up and/or gained traction.
I'm logging referrers so I can see how much of an effect that has - if it turns out to be significant I'll segment the results.
Great question. I'm wondering the same about Facebook.
How are companies supposed to do business in a country that won't let them? When China says "Sorry, you broke our laws, we're confiscating all your assets here.", what is Google going to do?

Are you equally sickened that Google doesn't do business in Cuba?
HTTP Video Streaming in iPhone 3.0 - Want to run an online TV Network?
There are some other really interesting looking talks at RubyConf this year also: http://rubyconf.org/pages/program. I only wish that it hadn't sold out so quickly.
He rewrote hexfiend too, which is my most favoritest piece of Mac software.
Even if Google isn't explicitly censoring it, Chinese censorship as a whole is going to severely limit either the knowledge of the 1989 protests, the number of websites that are willing to mention it, or both. That will inevitably have an effect on Google's results.
I'm not advocating just for the arts specifically, but rather for a degree of thoughtfulness, stemming from the belief that;

1. Education is valuable

2. You likely do not fully appreciate the complexity and beauty of areas that you have not studied at all.

Many outside this community are dismissive of mathematics, and they would be just as wrong.
Mediocrity is the swan song of a dieing company.
I've always disliked the use of the word apology used all along :( (I went into that before so I wont again) but the PM's response is actually nicely measured.

Well done I guess.
You might like to make a simple form where I could paste some code and select the language from a drop down.
The long-awaited DreamScreen tablet computer comes from HP, not Apple
I actually thought the OP made some good points..!

The superstar coders are much harder to work with.

I think a lot of readers took this article the wrong way or were somehow offended by it. Why..?

This almost sounds a little like Eric Sink on software and is somewhat opposed to Paul Graham's philo, which is basically: the more super stars you have on your team the better. The OP sounds more in favor of building a cohesive team.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/mas/md/md15.htm