skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty sure boucher is aware :)
A friend of mine made millions selling his TCP/IP stacks since the mid 80s; he has written tens of them, all in various assembly languages.

Let me add that most of his work was for TCP/IP over serial ..
Charming Python: Decorators make magic easy
Really, I think the question is more like, "what are the good and cheap alternatives?" GoDaddy is inexpensive, but dealing with their constant up-sells and their various ploys to get more money can be frustrating and annoying.

I host my domains at GoDaddy because it's cheap. I preferred GANDI prior to that because their quality of service was high and their willingness to keep the crap to a minimum was one of their primary objectives. (I still use GANDI's VPS service.)

I would love to find a cheap, good alternative to GoDaddy, but every time I look for one, I come up dry.
The color was changed.
I hope it lasts long enough to gather some stats on voting; whether or not more or less votes are cast with the new system, how spread out they are etc. I liked the idea of masking votes when it was initially suggested too. Bravo to pg for trying it out.
About 1.5 years ago, I compiled something to answer this very question. It seems that now there's something new to add to the list for why GoDaddy should not be trusted.

http://domains.zentu.net
A clickable link: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
This interesting because I do pretty much the same thing on my website http://ETFtable.com except that is for all ETFs, it is sortable, filterable, and I do all the technical analysis in the browser in Javascript.
F# has been announced as being part of Visual Studio 2010, so no separate downloads in the future.
Online dictionary gateway: general english & specialized terms
From the preview that I saw it looked like a good comic so far.
edw, dcurtis, patio, pg, dhouston, sama, dfranke, rms, nickb, ryanwaggoner, tptacek, cperciva, jacquesm, pclark,	jgrahamc, jasonlbaptiste, wheels.

all of these people have at one point posted a comment that made me go hmm... that was thoughtful and well written. who is this person? prolific posters had a higher chance to be on this list because they had more posts (duh).

and nostrademons because i loved reading the diffle blog
Aboodman seems to have a better handle on it than I do. I think what I said about the dom object is correct, but he point out that window is the default value of this for other function calls.
WITN?: In sort-of defence of Britain’s ridiculous libel laws
I wish you luck in implementing it.
> This speaks directly to the 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Big companies often don't follow through

I find with large companies it is 1% inspiration and 99% respiration (aka meetings).
Exceptional Ability = Practice + Availability of Time
for Practice
+ Motivation
If its optical, and a single "conductor", it probably doesn't matter what orientation you have the cable. Make it round, like a headphone jack.
In Paris, at the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians, he witnesses a titanic clash between Henri Poincaré and David Hilbert, the two greatest mathematicians of the day, over the importance of intuition versus proof. Returning to England, Russell spends the next decade laboring with Alfred North Whitehead to complete the epic “Principia Mathematica” — all the while doing his best to seduce Whitehead’s comely wife, Evelyn. Their (stillborn) masterpiece runs many thousands of pages, a mere 362 of which are required to prove the interesting proposition “1 + 1 = 2.”

Sounds like a thrilling basis for a comic.

I tried to open the preview:

http://software.libredigital.com/bookrdr/live/Reader.swf?pgu...

However, it gave me an error on Safari running in Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
Preventing Credit Card Mess
Is that better? No and please let us not get two dots for tens lest we start re-discovering variants of Chinese counting rods.
MS decided to jump on the Functional language bandwagon. I looked at the specs of F# for a bit and I think it looks pretty good. But, I think the average MS developer (C# or VB) is going to have a hard time getting it.
class HotDog
@condiments
def getCondiments
return @condiments // @condiments is an instance variable of an instance of HotDog
end
end

note the mod to both the ivar def and the comment. You also do not need the initial ivar "definition" as ruby defines them on the fly when they are first referenced.
You can read more about it here:

http://marketprognosticator.blogspot.com/2009/07/real-vampir...

(I posted this in reply to Luca's post when I first read it.)

The basic idea is that you chase the herd. The problem comes from two areas. If sentiment changes, and there's a big herd, the price can change very quickly, and you might not be fast enough to come away with gains. The other problem is the transaction cost (commission, stamp duty, capital gains tax, etc.) of chasing the momentum, continually trading stocks, eating away at gains.
Do you know why it was designed this way? Was 'new' added to javascript after the behavior of 'this' was already well defined and the creators did not feel comfortable changing it?
The behavior of 'this' is from DOM bindings and not from the language per se. Javascript can set 'this' of any calling context to any object with 'apply' or 'call'. The convention for on* handlers is that 'this' is set to the DOM element when the handlers are called. I only learned to appreciate this, when I wrote my own little JS DOM framework a la JQuery or Dojo.
The "meta-meta language-language" he mentions is OMeta. OMeta combines parsing and lexing and allows you to build your AST in your host language. It's really expressive and beats the pants off any other parsing framework I've used. The Viewpoints group is doing some of the most exciting work in CS right now, there's a lot of other interesting ideas they've been working on.

There are Python and Ruby implementations available. You can play with OMeta here:
http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/
make the site even slower

Yes, concerning the site speed I definitely upvote the idea of making the server faster. Maybe they really removed the comment scores to save bandwidth. ;)
It seems that the dots were implemented rather quickly after removing scores due to user feedback.

I am wondering was there actually conclusive data (other than negative feedback, which might have been enough?) during when the score was removed and before the dot was implemented. As in, without a way to see the high scoring comments, did the quality of child comments go down? And if so what? Voting behavior changed?

Or was it an issue of being able to easily see popular comments? (And if it was the later, then maybe there are other solutions of visualizing highly ranked comments although likely more complicated, like a sort)
The gameboy connector is rhomboid along the long edge and with a longer bevel, making it much harder to insert incorrectly.

It's usage is also a very special case -- the variance is in the cables, not the sockets. Only Nintendo had any reason to manufacture devices, and they always implemented it correctly with fascia preventing forced insertion.
SOAP is so 20th century :-)

Seriously, a long time ago I implemented SOAP for a commercial J2EE product, and used SOAP, but I don't use it anymore. Good riddance - REST style is easier to support and use.

I just wrote a book for APress on Web 3.0, and my pitch was that it is more about publishing and reusing data.
Most Crashes Happen On Dry Roads…
I've always wanted a cheap GPS device with a really long battery life and adapters to plug into anything (car, usb, wall). I want to drop it in my bags (especially when I travel), keep it with me when I run, and attach it to expensive things (hidden in my car). Then have a companion website that lets user's access/download/delete and map their data. You'd have to have some plain english privacy guarantees to keep from scaring people away.

Validation and opportunity:
1. iPhone apps that track running routes successfully charge money. The gps on these things sucks and carrying it can be cumbersome.
2. OnStar and similar car systems are popular and their interactive features are being replaced by phones.
3. Suggestions?
No, unfortunately it's really bad. I appreciate it as an example of how far afield you are willing to search for a solution, but it's visually distracting and difficult to interpret.
Ask HN: Great Interview Answers?
There are many posts of the hopeless answers candidates give at technical interviews, and they are good for a laugh. Now for something positive and inspiring ... What were the question you asked, the best answers you got and how the interviewee (I'm assuming they were good enough to be hired) turned out to be in the long term?
I think this is a good idea, and I think it is very doable with relatively little up front investment, given what sorts of small linux-capable boards are available now.

If you put more brains on it, for example something like BackupPC, there would be a market for that also.
I think you're implicitly part of the community once you sign up.
I should have mentioned: Keep it cheap by not have any IO other than on/off and maybe an old school battery warning light.
I'm starting the process of moving from godaddy over the next week or two. Long overdue, but name reg is a "sticky" business which is why a boycott although a great idea will take consistent pushing.

After some review, it seems namecheap will be an acceptable route. One concern is the recent lawsuit lost by namecheap for private whois info. I hope this doesn't make them legally gun shy. Although the lawsuit results should effect all U.S. based registrars equally. Anyone have recent opinions on namecheap or any others?
Nicely done. When I first clicked on it I though it was a java applet but then, on looking at the source, I see you're using the Yahoo User Interface library.

Where is the source of your ETF data?
Guidelines: "Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."
No, Glenn Reynolds is a glibertarian who always votes, supports, and blogs about conservative causes.

Also, the Acorn worker in question reported the two actors in the video to police: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,553423,00.html
That or it will be red shirts doing all the commits.
I'm surprised nobody suggested adding a mouse over to the orange dots. The first thing I did was mouse-over to look for a tooltip to explain the dot and got nothing.
Tossing the vote count is an interesting experiment. The orange dot, hard to say. It was confusing to me and I'm not really sure it adds value. It may skew data out of the experiment of eliminating vote count.
This is pretty damning stuff. In a well-functioning media environment, it would be sufficient to seriously damage the credibility of the pollster involved (Strategic Vision), or at least shift the burden to them to explain their behavior.

Instead, we already see clues about what will happen: the pollster is threatening a lawsuit, which will be a sure loser but nonetheless drain resources and time from its target (either Nate himself or fivethirtyeight). The polls from the offending pollster will, I'm completely certain, be reported with utter credulity in the 2010 election cycle and beyond. The fact that the books are cooked will not even be mentioned in media reports, and will ultimately matter not at all.

This is because we simply do not have a well-functioning media environment.
Analysis of Nate Silver's Analysis of Oklahoma Student Poll Pollster Fraud 
Using machine learning to take a closer look at a couple of the models Nate presents and arguments he makes. A bit of a surprising conclusion.
Here's a bit more on the subject:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846514
First, patents related to software must die, asap.

Second, there is so much prior art on this, if it gets approved we know the patent office is on the take.
There were multiple Acorn workers in question (you can see the 4-5 videos off of the original site that launched it at Andrew Breitbart's biggovernment.com site). That being said, the fact that Acorn fired this particular woman really undermines their defense. Given the many other serious allegations against the organization however, it is good to know that the Obama Administration has called for an investigation into Acorn's activities.

I think this only reinforces the original point that we need more investigations like this and people who are willing to challenge various organizations and governments - and further - that traditional media outlets are often either unable (given the breadth of targets/perceived costs) or unwilling (possibly because of ideology?) to do it.

[On Glenn Reynolds, you'll find that he has been less than supportive of Republicans pointing out that the 'tea parties' are less about being pro-Republican as they are about being more a reaction to greater government interventions - which were started under the previous Republican administration]
Agreed. The numbering, for me, is a good sign of which comments to keep an eye on while scanning the page, rather than get lost in text.
Leave the numbers all visible, or only show me the number on my own comment, but otherwise, stop messing around. This is distracting. I know there's a mob-voting mentality, but I actually read the comments, not the votes. Stop clubbing me over the head about the votes.
Yes, TCP/IP is damned simple if you model it as a trivial lock-step protocol. And this is a slick little piece of code. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with the 10,000+ lines of code that modern operating systems deploy to allow hundreds of competing TCPs to figure out how to share a link.

Interview question: what's the important thing TCP provides over UDP?

Fail answer: I don't know.

Push answer: Reliability.

Win answer: Congestion control.
Interesting how often this is discussed, and it looks like there are already a couple of efforts going on.

It was previously mentioned here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407067

The hacker news SICP group that spawned: http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-news-reads-sicp?hl=en&...

Also a wizard book study as well: http://groups.google.com/group/wizardbookstudy/

It might almost be better to merge all of these ideas, as there appears to be interest!
I think their lack of disclosure has already severely damaged them.

Ultimately, in this case it would seem the damage will be pretty brutal unless Nate Silver was wrong. Either they don't sue and don't disclose and the result is no one trusts them enough to pay for their polling (after all, what's the point in paying for a poll if it's going to come under question afterwards?) or they'll sue while not releasing the support for their polls/data on their merits - and that also opens them up to discovery which could be even more damaging.

The best case scenario at this point is if they can publicly prove Nate Silver is wrong. And based on their policies in the past of not releasing the additional supporting data, I suspect this won't happen.
I had no idea I could subscribe to just the edw comments. Thanks!
Use a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_bicycle to teach children to ride.
i met one of the guys who came from de shaw to work there once. for one thing, shockmarket's director of technology became vpe @ mint.com later on.
mechanical_fish

(edw, patio, cperciva, mattmaroon, 100 others, but if you asked me for one name that typified the whole place, to free associate, I'd say mechanical_fish).
Generation Squeezed
To Explain Longevity Gap, Look Past Health System
Are you doing this for fun or do you have something else in mind ? I'm curious :)
After 78 pages I now feel somewhat qualified to say something about the book: It seems to be great. I like its non-preachy style and its very limited and seemingly well executed approach of supplying the reader nearly exclusively with baseline numbers. This is what we have – we only have to find out what we can change and how.

I also like that for once I get a realistic and detailed approximation of my energy usage. There are quite a few surprises in there.
They Might Be Giants: Here Comes Science
It's distracting. Can't the experiment not have any threshold indicators, run it like that for a couple of weeks, get some idea about how the comments are, and then add/subtract features?

People can check Lists, for interesting stories/comments. http://news.ycombinator.com/lists
Extremely smart book. Read most way through his draft version a few months ago. Ordered it in paperback, looking forward to rereading the final copy.

Seems pretty up the middle as he tends to attack all sides who spout off bullshit numbers. However, there's going to be a lot of political hate for this book. Oh well, that's the world we live in. Truth and pure data analysis is very under appreciated in todays hyper partisan political environment.
I'm inordinately fond of using decorators for adding metadata attributes as markup on functions:

def add_example(*args):
def decorate(fn):
if not hasattr(fn, 'examples'):
fn.examples = []
fn.examples.insert(0, args)
return fn
return decorate

I use decorators like this to add extra command-line options to methods, annotate what types to construct from a command-line string, add typed __doc__ extensions, note example input/output for unit testing and documentation, etc.
> The trouble with the Acorn videos is that they're a partisan attempt to discredit the opposition.

We already know how the civility argument works. The tea-party folks are bringing violence to US politics and the G20 thugs are crumpets and milk.

> While the videos themselves seem legit, I'd rather not leave exposes of political groups up to their political enemies.

Bully for you, but they're pretty much the only folks willing to do the work.

If you don't like the way news is made, make your own.
No,

The first @condiments would define a class variable.

class HotDog
attr_accessor :condiments
end

Or for Java-socialized folks:

class HotDog
def initialize
@condiments = nil
end

def getCondiments
return @condiments
end
end
How about a third possibility - that there never really was much investigative journalism?
Recursion without requiring some kind of name primitive.
Does anybody have a mirror? It appears to be down for me.
Get And Keep Yourself Motivated [list post]
Health care: It’s time for technology
I’m pretty sure there are a few font elements that could’ve been removed first. ;)
Baths don't seem to make much sense: you're soaking in the very filth you're trying to clean off of yourself, and after you're done, you're still soapy so you need to rinse off anyway. It also takes time to draw the bath, time that you would otherwise be washing yourself.

When I was young though, I would close the drain, shower, and then take a bath once the bathtub was full.
I don't see any word about licensing. I, for one, can't wait to see Monoprice start pumping out jackbox sets for this!
I think that might have been Arthur Quiller-Couch advising to "murder all your darlings", according to the book Writing Tools I was reading last night.
Is that a universal correlation, or just looking at any particular area?

Because assuming people in a certain group have a certain level of skill, it makes sense that people with below average intelligence in that group may be compensating with extra conscientiousness, while people with above average intelligence for that group could have been part of a better group, but their lack of conscientiousness dragged them down.

I.e. being less conscientious doesn't make you more intelligent. Rather, the less conscientious you are, the more likely you are to end up surrounded by people with less intelligence than you (who make up for it with more conscientiousness than you).
>As an American creative worker, I confront a global workforce that has, with the opening of markets, expanded by three billion people from the other side of the world, 300 million of whom are English-speaking middle-class Indians, every other one of whom is writing a novel or crafting new design-template software but will soon ...

But the other half of the cup has now added three more billion potential customers for you! Yah! but these people don't even have shoes, sell them shoes!
The purpose of upvotes here is what? Is it to decide where in a thread which comments will go? If that's the case, I see no reason for any visual cue as to number of upvotes. Their position means I will see them first. (Comments about weighted averages of comment threads used to determine position also work well.) If it's a tool to reward people for their insightfulness, why not let them show it off? Perhaps the problem is that the comment system is designed to do both, and one function is conflicting with the other.

Personally, I like seeing my karma go up when I submit useful comments or stories, so they work as a reward for me (and possibly everyone else here). However, I think the more important function of up/downvotes is bringing the 'best' discussions to the top and burying the garbage.

My dictatorial solution would be to hide comment count (and all visual indicators other than thread position), from everyone but the user they belong to. I would still get my 'reward', the mob-voting influence would be diminished, and comment quality would go up.
That's what I meant. Unless it gets approved as a standard it's not going to be widespread.
Ask HN: Any cool sites that do IP GeoLocation?
Anyone know of some good examples of sites that provide services based of GeoLocation of your IP?
To clarify my "how hard" sentiment - I had in mind that the normal sort function becomes a "function selector" that grabs the user's chosen sort function from their profile, then applies that to the comments.

The difficulty in all this would be policing the kind of code that can be written - perhaps a small DSL that compiles into arc code, or possibly direct arc code that gets vetted by a/some moderators.

The actual sort function seems to be (from arc3.tar, but may well have been changed here... nothing is safe from a REPL!)
EDIT: indeed! see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845932

(def display-subcomments (c user whence (o indent 0))
(each k (sort (compare > frontpage-rank:item) c!kids)
(display-comment-tree (item k) user whence indent)))

so that in itself should not be too hard to modify, and provided it is not that much more complex, I can't see it putting that much more strain on the server. The sort function gets called for each page view, the user's profile (username / logout / threads) gets accessed for each view, so the only thing that needs to be resolved is the specific sort function.

The conversation threading could indeed become a bit fragmented, but then again, each time you look at a story on HN the comments will be in a different order due to the weighting and voting.
Don't higher rated comments get pushed to the top?

And of course these dots will help you locate higher rated comments that get pushed to the bottom (perhaps because they replied to a low rated comment).
Nope, meant those long blog posts. But you make a good point.
Can you explain why there would be hundreds of competing TCPs?

I thought there were only a handful (Tahoe, Reno, Vegas, New Reno et al) of popular algorithms for the congestion control bit but it's all still TCP as specced in RFC 2581, no?

From where does all the complexity come?
This sounds an awful lot like welfare for people "attempting to create music". Are you sure that's what you mean to say?
Course, that was a work computer, so if we upgrade it may as well be for Windows 7.
Let's be fair; that's not really why papers are hurting financially. It was a sudden and drastic drop in advertisers, not people switching to blogs. Newspapers used to make lots of money on ads from national retailers, auto dealers, financial companies, and real estate. Those are four of the worst possible groups to have as your clients.