skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congratulations!

I loved the idea about the NY Times quiz. (I got it wrong). It's a little thing, but it may have been just the hook to catch the right fish.

I try to learn something from everything here. This was a great lesson that I hope to put to use myself someday.
Very true. That's a problem that in principle can be fixed, though. Your "fake" sciences can in principle all be approached using the scientific method. They are actually real sciences. It's just a portion of the practitioners that hurt their credibility. My guess is that it's the inherently complex subject matter that allows politically-charged crackpots and other non-scientists to squeeze their way in and call themselves scientists.
It may be helpful to move the datestamps of Ruby Inside's entries up to the top, and more prominently style them (size, colour). I was this close to chastising you for not having datestamps at all :) until I noticed the one for this article in small, non-descript black text between the post and the comments.
Client-server applications such as the Web and e-mail will work just fine through CGNs and IPv6-to-IPv4 translators, but peer-to-peer applications such as VoIP and BitTorrent, not so much.

...

So enjoy your peer-to-peer applications while you can; their expiration date will be coming up not long after 2010.

Oh, come now. Every major ISP has a VoIP project to support competition with local telcos. The telcos can see the benefits of VoIP and are or will be offering VoIP soon as well.

With http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication a major driver of hosting IP demand should decrease.

ISPs can provide the vast majority of todays users NAT with no ill effects -- in fact, ISPs could even sell it as a security feature, as you're keeping all of the bad guys away from the end user device.

We haven't even started using mitigation strategies in the USA. We have a long way to go before there's any concern -- we might "run out" of public IPs to pass out to every customer, but we're a long way from not being able to sell some services to people because of a resource shortage.
So your logic is basically, "I have cancer, but it's ok, lots of other people do too. No need to see the doctor."
Why do you think that the plane is going to fly regardless? If there are 100 people on a plane you're causing 1/100 of the environmental damage. It's true that in 99 of the 100 cases there is no extra plane flying, but in 1 of the 100 cases there is an extra plane flying just because of you.
If more people travel by plane the airlines notice and build new planes.
Interesting story.

One thing I've always wondered about these war games (I realize it's somewhat tangential to the actual point of the story, but...) -- how do you know when you're "dead"? Some guy plays dead, then leaps up with a machine gun and starts firing -- what exactly was he firing? And isn't "playing dead" an especially unfair tactic when the "actual dead" are also playing dead?
You'll notice that the PCI incompatibility was only recently confirmed - 17th Aug 2009.

Also, the card processing could easily be hosted elsewhere with the rest of the app on EC2. It just works out better not to do that at the moment.
The project, by being centered around the needless use of resources, promotes the needless use of resources. That promotion adds to the impact of the needless usage itself.
Essentially, we run the same code on the server side as we do on the client side in order to unarchive the objects that get archived on the client, and then operate on them. For example, when you hit "export", the presentation is archived, sent over the wire, unarchived (using the same exact model code), then converted to PPT or whatever.

You could also for example make an entire UI in code on the server, complete with connections to abstract objects, then send that entire object graph over the wire and show it on the client.
Large segments of the U.S. population are not considering careers in IT

I dunno, the last thing this field needs are more people without passion, regardless of personal demographic. If someone isn't considering a career in IT, why push them? They'll have a hard time achieving much success if they don't care that much, and they'll make life suck for their fellow workers.

I can't imagine doing anything else. I would hope that others considering the field felt the same way, no matter who they are.
Electrical circuit runs entirely off power in trees
On a related note, it would be useful to have more fonts. I went to try using the font my company's logo uses and it wasn't there. Good apart from that, though.
Good thing they pulled it, god knows what script kiddies would have done to the iPhone platform once they learned how to access the basic interpreter on the C64.

sys49152?

Seriously, how insane are these people at Apple app approval department?
The Triumph of the Geek: The Evolution of Tech-Obsessed Nerds Through Time
"Down with the pointy-headed academics! Their magical theories have failed us again!"

It is ridiculous to blame academics for forming and publishing theories. The theories did not cause anything to happen. Someone who didn't understand them decided to use them anyways. Anyone who takes an academic theory, and blindly applies it, without understanding it is bound to screw themselves. From the article:

"most traders know it does not work and only pretend to use it because finance theory is fashionable and criticizing the model is a heresy"

So, they knew the theory didn't work for their purposes, tried it anyways, and now blame the people who made the theory. Brilliant.
I will try to tackle this one.

Imagine you finished college and 4 years of working at hypermegacorp as a sr. software developer or a product marketing manager.

Now around you, you see some of your superiors have MBA's (certainly not all), you are single, you have been working very hard, and you have saved up $100k.

MBA = up the ladder + meeting other career driven, socially not awkward people + free time + you have the money.

4 years later, you're a "director of...", married, well-read, and went to europe, australia, japan, and hawaii twice.

It's not for me, but that's my impression of an MBA.
Some time ago Trevor Blackwell of YC wrote an interesting piece related to the issue of keeping wealth. It's short and worth reading: http://tlb.org/interest.html

I don't know what the situation is in SF, but I can attest that there is no shortage of homeless and crazy people in Sweden. I guess that holds true for any European country.
Finally, a story in which YC misjudged... :)

Congrats...
speaking as someone who has personally built several hundred servers over the years, and who has managed several tends of thousands of servers for others, I would argue that there is a sort of 'reverse economy of scale' operating in the hardware market.

Now, I'm on the technical side of things except at my own company, where I am everything, so my views on what the 'enterprise' pays are second hand, that is, what the boss tells me when I tell him that 'x amount of ram would solve your problem, and would be cheaper than the Y days of sysadmin time we are spending on it'. But these are my impressions:

Unlike the desktop market, all the large-scale server VARs have a 'sliding scale' where the larger you are, the more you pay. And even if you pay 'small business' rates to dell for your servers (which are much lower than 'enterprise' rates, from what I see) you still end up paying 3x-4x what I pay buying the parts and building the server itself.

Even if I charge you $500 for building the server (which is gouging, but if you wanted support, that's probably what I'd ask.) I could sell you a 32GiB ram, 8 core 2.2Ghz shanghai for $2000 before disk. For another grand I could build you the same server with 64GiB ram. Compare that to anything from dell.

edit: I don't actually sell anything that isn't a 'service' so I don't have a retail license. when I build people servers, I have them buy the parts, then I charge them a fee for labor and support.
Is your app an ass-kisser?
A/B and Qualitative User Testing
I use it and like it. Keep up the good work!
Yes, but the discussion was about whether Mississippi pays higher social costs than Europe. This has nothing to do with how much C02 Mississippi itself releases.
Patton Oswalt in Portland – Ticket Giveaway | On Portland
TV advertising showing promise in some markets
TLB: The Miracle of Compound Interest
The formatting string itself, sure - fine. What I think is ugly is using an operator (%) to call a function like that :/ It's just non-obvious and quirky. If you don't know ruby you won't be able to guess what it's doing.
> _PHP & MySQL For Dummies_

That may be a pretty big part of the explanation. Most of the apps build on knowlegde rathered in that book, would probably benefit from being released from the constraints of SQL (and on the level of a blog or forum app SQL is more of a constraint than a benefit).
yes, he's got good PR here ;-D from comments on some of my previous comments, I'd suggest flagging any posts that you do not like :)

Pasting here for convenience - (by robg)
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dammit when is apple going to release one of these so people think it's cool?
The Aesthetics of Web Apps in 6 Questions
cross link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=811860
While I think some of these new projects are great for certain tasks, this sentiment resonates with me often when talking with nosql evangelists.
Complimenting Enterprise RDBMS with Hadoop
As I remember, it was an infrared system very similar to today's laser tag (combat troops of the 80s, please weigh in). I think it was called MILES. You wore this thing around your head and on your body for a target?

The main thing I remember was loading blanks into magazines and putting this weird cap on the end of the rifles. As the weapons were fired (which sounded just like live fire to me) the laser was activated. There was some kind of coded thing going on as well.

So you could fire anything that could take a blank. The flash-bangs, of course, were real. As were the concussion grenades and tear gas (if it was used).

I didn't see what happened to my sergeant, so I can't say how he faked it. I know it pissed off a lot of guys from Charlie company, though.
I think PG would be the first to tell aspiring entrepreneurs that while being accepted to YC is a strong indicator of future success, a much stronger indicator is relentless drive and determination. This is clearly a case of the latter. Congratulations!
"Better Spealing" need After The Deadline (http://afterthedeadline.com/).

Congrats Guys, being rejected by YC is not a curse.
"But what if the reason that women don't take part in CS is because it isn't desirable?"

I consider that likely, actually. I am also not sure who is shouting about the women in IT issue - is it really feminists?
please also add a year
No sarcasm, I really mean we have to commit ourselves to investigate and point out all areas where there is an imbalance. Not just where we would want more women or men, in this instance computer science.

I think also there is a lack of women in the fishing industry, out on the boats.
Misjudged? Not necessarily.

While getting acquired is cool for the founders, getting acquired so early is usually not in YC's interest and I doubt they'd have too much regret over (what is likely) a super-small acquisition.
You didn't read it. I'm arguing for a more complex model, rather than an idealistic one.

"Less total weight carried, across the system as a whole, would result in less fuel consumption."

While this is correct from very simple standpoint, what are you really saying?

"The system carries n amount of weight." Okay, I can accept that.

"The system carries less weight if one person does not fly." True, but that one person's weight is offset on the specific flight in question by cargo.

For a very large value of n, n-200 = n. An airplane takes a massive amount of fuel to accelerate to rotation speed (it's not just pushing you and cargo, it's also shoving vast quantities of aluminum, steel, plastic and fuel.) The empty weight of a 747-400 (the industry standard) is 400,000 lbs., of which 200 is no factor.

If that empty plane takes off, it will use 100 times the body weight of a human being in fuel during takeoff operations alone and continue to burn as much during each hour of cruise flight. Adding humans decreases range. Adding cargo decreases range. Fuel will be burned.

Your statement assumes a very simple model of "if I don't get on that plane, I'm saving the environment." The actual model is "if at least 200 people don't get on that plane, a seasonally-appropriate ~15 minute delay will happen until cargo can be loaded."

I feel, therefore, that I have contradicted your statement quite soundly. I assure you that I have no interest in representing myself as an environment-hating industry apologist.
Jakob Nielsen: Social Media Outsourcing Can Be Risky
A lot of pure-Ruby people don't get how powerful this is.

My startup, which will have an early alpha up at the end of the month, leverages a lot of JRuby's easy Java integration features. Solr, for example, has been a big win for us -- I've written a Rails plugin that ties to an embedded Solr server, and because there's no network overhead, search requests on indexed data finish up in under 30ms before the cache has warmed up, and 1ms once the index has been cached.

On top of that, the JVM (with JRuby, Rails, a database, and Solr) uses less than 200M of RAM even when being pounded by our benchmark suite, and produces impressive performance results... even when running on my laptop. On a full-fleged server machine, the numbers are even more impressive.

And all of this, without having to write a single line of Java. It's a good time to be hacking on Ruby.
Apple might offer a `Cocktail’ of new iPods and music
YC may also suffer from an embarrassment of riches, where they have more good startups than they have resources to fund.
It's probably a combo of the fact that he's YC alum, his articles are also an experiment in art directing every single individual post, plus you don't find a lot of designers that exhibit the hacker mentality of tinkering with stuff in public to see how it works. As a designer, the natural instinct is to wait until something is fully baked and say "ta da! look how pretty this is!" rather than show a work in progress.

That's what makes Mark Boulton's Drupal work so interesting as well:

http://www.d7ux.org/
Unlike the desktop market, all the large-scale server VARs have a 'sliding scale' where the larger you are, the more you pay.

I suspect this is somewhat true, but if you don't abuse your salesperson too much you can probably negotiate those prices down. Also, at really large scale (1,000 servers?) you can buy the super-cheap "off the menu" servers like iDataplex and Dell DCS.
Hear, Here! The internet is thankful for all the future Wordpress-powered blogs whose writers will be spared the embarrassment of confusing its and it's, their and there, and complementary and complimentary. Congrats!
A question for the AtD folks: Do you have any concerns about being acquired by a company which builds such a famously insecure product?

Speaking as someone who cares a lot about security, I'd be concerned about the reputation for poor security "rubbing off" on me.
Offline Wikipedia
Also there is always tax to consider.
I wouldn't suspect feminists of wanting to get an advantage, but I suspect they might be reacting to sensationalist and distorted statistics at times. Just because there are different numbers of males and females in some positions does not imply that discrimination is the cause.
If your company is on solid footing, it shouldn't matter if your stock price is zero (that'd be great, actually; you could buy back your whole company). Your argument is functionally equivalent to saying that any number of unfunded and dead startups could have made it if only they'd gotten a $5M Series A round. They didn't because investors didn't think it was a good bet. Public companies that need cash infusions to survive face the same situation -- they are at the mercy of their prospective investors. There is nothing wrong with this.
no. We don't need so many. I think they are an excuse for people not to learn a technique themselves. In general the win from using one of these frameworks is small and the overhead is high - you'd be as well off to just learn how to lay out a grid and deal with margins/padding, etc manually. Their use also seems to come at the expense of messing up your html by shooting it with the class/id shotgun - something some people seem ok with but I dislike.

Maybe it's a sign that css needs to refined in some areas to make it easier or clearer to do the things people are try to do.
Yup. IPv4 can be stretched and band-aided to form some kind of network, but it would require always some effort, and I would prefer if that effort would be directed to advance IPv6 proliferation. But as short-term planning is trendy these days, so ISPs probably will just keep holding onto the sinking boat also known as IPv4
Highly, highly recommend this book to anyone who hasn't taken the time yet. Not all that revolutionary for anyone firmly grounded in the real ins and outs of probability, but surprisingly revolutionary for those who know just enough probability to be dangerous, so to speak.
Tagul - beautiful tag clouds
I developed a few toy projects to learn each framework.

Cappuccino is an incredible technical accomplishment. I've done iPhone development, and it's true that you can easily map your Cocoa experience onto Cappuccino. However, when I hit a corner case such as embedding a SWF, the abstraction leak was a nightmare.

Sproutcore feels safer because it doesn't hide the fact you're working with HTML/CSS; you need to write it to create custom views. Inserting a SWF was straightforward.

The other reason I favor Sproutcore is the feeling Cappuccino has cargo cult issues. For example, Sproutcore uses namespaces while Cappuccino just prefixes initials. In Sproutcore you have "SC.Object" while Cappuccino uses "CPObject."

Cappuccino is still pre 1.0, so all of this could change, but if I had to choose a framework to write an app today, I'd go with Sproutcore.
You mean like it rubbed of on Bill Gates ?
I agree that there are edge cases like yourself who've been moved by the crisis. I also like that thanks to Google and Palm, there are now legitimate options beyond the iPhone that aren't terrible. (With apologies to RIM, which was good before Apple did a thing but which bombed at making their multitouch OS.)

However, my point was that by and large the market is apathetic, and it's unclear whether that will change before Apple fixes itself on its own. I'm certain Apple's working on making things better, because Apple's more aware than anybody else what happens when you lose out because of your platform.
If anyone wants to know what the ten deutschmark bill looks like:

http://www.cunymath.cuny.edu/images/sidebar/gauss_10_DM.jpg
Does anybody have a good elsip project idea?

I been trying to learn elisp but I didn't have good enough excuses to write anything in elisp.
Duly noted, thanks. I don't think this is flag-worthy; I mildly enjoyed it. I'm just curious why his posts do so extraordinarily well here.
because the game is rigged

That's exactly what pg was referring to when he spoke of historical contexts and the controls other than the market in allocating wealth.
I actually did read your post, thanks. Your post didn't seem to argue for a more complex model as much as attempt to make the case that if people weren't flying they'd be doing other equally destructive things.

>While this is correct from very simple standpoint, what are you really saying?

What I'm saying is quite simple. Carelessly wasting resources, as unnecessarily flying nonstop for a month does, wastes resources and we shouldn't condone it.

>that one person's weight is offset on the specific flight in question by cargo.

If someone doesn't fly and cargo is substituted for them, that amount of cargo doesn't need to be flown on a separate flight. The less flights the less fuel consumed and the less environmental damage, no?
PostSQL is better than NoSQL
Looks cool, but you should make it a greasemonkey script, so I don't have to press it on every page.

Also, give the bookmarklet link on the page a better name than hn.js - to make a bookmarklet, the easiest is to drag that link to your toolbar, but that gives it a title of hn.js.
It's great that the author found a way to continue working on something he loves but there's a tremendously broad spectrum that 'acquired' could technically fall under - from 'sold one license and got a job' to 'my investors bought another beach house and my grandchildren can afford to be fulltime cocaine addicts'. We don't really know where this particular deal falls.
Looks cool...the font is a bit hard to read though. Perhaps you could add a bit of code in that checks the header link styles and uses those same background and link colors for the little popup.
Sumo: One-off EC2 Instance Launching
I don't use anything resembling the italic style of handwriting, but I do applaud any attention that the issue manages to receive. When this conversation comes up, you hear a lot of people say 'Who uses pen and paper anymore? I only type these days.' But then, the moleskine is an icon for nerds and geeks everywhere, so there's another data point for you.

As for me, I write quite a lot of things down. I don't use italic or block printing; I actually over the last several years started with designing a single uniform style of alphabet to use, then moving on a series of word and letter-sequence abbreviations, glyphs, and the like, in inspiration from the writing systems of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

I guess my point is: given the set of aesthetic values that so many hackers and geeks share, and the sheer amount of time that they spend dealing with letters of all kinds, I am surprised that more of them seem to have absolutely no investment whatsoever in their personal manual expression of written language.
From the article:

> This is because the Lisp standard tries to specify a portable language, not a library.

> Note that even the C language doesn't include these things.

That's true, but the POSIX standard library functions are packaged with almost any C environment except for embedded systems and is usually available 'out of the box'.

Of course there is a clear distinction between what is part of the language and what is part of the library.

Is there an equivalent to so say 'stdlib' in the LISP world ?
That would be me. Thank you very much :) My last day in the (active duty) Air Force was spent at NECCDC 08 and it was great to work with you guys for the 09 competition. Hopefully Daryl invites me back for 10.
My experience strongly disagrees. In my most advanced undergraduate math classes, and then my graduate school days there were a lot of women. Most of whom seemed to want to become mathematicians. The statistic I saw at the time said that women were 40% of people in graduate school in math nationwide.

This struck me as incredibly odd when every discipline that used a lot of math had very low numbers of women. Purportedly because "women find math hard". With the result that when I took a third year differential equations course, there was a sea of men. In my fourth year number theory course, half the (admittedly small) class were women.

Those numbers may have changed radically since.