skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree. MyISAM tables are easy to trash, and the table locking on update can bite you. There's no real disadvantage to using InnoDB other than having to learn to tune it a litte bit, and your data will be much safer.
so you kinda skipped the code review and refactoring parts, right?
I've been developing javascript for web applications and large consumer web sites for 10 years. Functional to OO to JSON notation. The ability to create a private function is a neat theoretical exercise, but the amount of code or change in coding patterns necessary to implement private functions is complete overkill.

Unless you are developing a huge javascript driven application, it does not actually matter if a method is private or public. Just don't call it. Much simpler/cleaner code, easier to read, easier to maintain. I'm a big proponent of making code simple instead of complex and private functions in javascript just add complexity.

Now, although I am skeptical, I would love to hear other commentors experience where they found private functions in javascript to be invaluable. What have you coded where making a method private added value to your code making it worth the increased complexity?
Sounds like a lot of dodgy rationalization for some pretty shady practice.
Prices paid for UK businesses on the rise
Not as a pet. Urban foxes are well-known in the UK, and they have dens in people's gardens/yards, often without the owners having a clue.
It's visually improved, but functionally, it's not much better and in some ways, worse.

Besides the lack of mobile support, looking at train schedules is not more difficult. My preferred stop is only in service on certain routes. Therefore, depending on the time, I may need to use a different station. Determining my options requires two tabs and mental comparing the departure times.

A coworker who rides the express trains out of the city noted that there is no indication of which departures are express, leaving one to do the math to see if their ride will be 20 minutes or an hour.
<MARQUEE><BLINK><FRAMESET>THESE ARE AWESOME!
It indexes quickly, but that's not live search. I can't pick a name and see what people around the world are saying about it. Google's just never designed anything to do that. Twitter has. So while the Internet's existed for a while, this live feedback has not.
One way to find code worth reading is to select inspiring developers and look at their code. Most of the developers in "Coders At Work" for example, have Open Source code we can look at learn from.

The best code I've seen: -

Common Lisp - "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Peter Norvig and "On Lisp" by Paul Graham

C - "C Interfaces and Implementations" and "LCC- a compiler for ANSI C" both by David Hanson. I also found the code for the Player/Stage robotic sim framework surprisingly readable.

I liked the Scala Actors library code as well.

If any HNers know any great codebases in Haskell or Erlang, please post here.
Similarly, registering the facebook account couldn't hurt.
He never mentioned anything about Sam Sethi. UK libel laws are a serious issue.
Yeah. This is a bit ridiculous, conning people into working for them for free at this project by calling it a game. What is up next - the "improve my search algorithm" game?
This should go without saying. You should be careful of everything you put out online. Blogs, Usenet posts, IRC, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc.
Difference is, twitter is often far less useful, since it doesn't have any notion of trustworthiness (yet). No PageRank. (Although afaik they're working on something like that). Also automated tweets are more of a problem than with Google. (PageRank also does well to get rid of the automated spam)

The trending tags on twitter just mean lots of people re-tweeted something. It's the equivalent of emails that say you should forward it to 100 friends to get good luck. In this case it was "You should be outraged by this, re-tweet it!". But the effect is the same.

Or it could just be twitter bots doing the retweeting.
Exactly! This would be great for those people that find computers too complicated.
And for people with 3.0+:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9148

Not that I've used it.
It's pretty cheap to buy domain names so if you have the $20-$30 to buy the domains do it. Why not.

Much better than to have somebody see you, recognize potential and buy your other domains and then demand some $15M for it.
Of course the odds of this happening are quite low, but nevertheless, in the event that you make it it's a small price to pay to avoid the future headache.
As the article mentions "No Toilet, No Bride" was a campaign with some funds from government that was used to increase awareness of sanitation in rural India. The innovative thing about this program was linking needs
to improve awareness about hygiene.

Many of the social initiatives/programs launched in India target basic needs to improve awareness. A few I can think of at the moment are :

a. Midday meal to children attending schools (feed the hungry, provide education)

b. National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme (provide employment and let the people do something helpful (building roads, canals etc) for the village/community)

I am no expert in this area and it seems to me that many of social schemes/programs have this mix of targeting the needs to spread awareness.

Would then all these social schemes be qualified as "hack" ?
<i>Dynamically typed languages are fine for smaller programs and simple web applications, but if you’re building something big, something that will be several millions of lines of code, you really need all the tools you can only get from a statically typed language</i>

From my experience I am only speak to the benefits provided by a statically typed languages as you try modularize the components. That isn't to say that a dynamically typed languages do not provide an alternative or similar benefit, I just do not have large project experience with them.

Not certain how he draws the causation from using agile to the resulting software being modularized and cohesive. It just is a case of correlation on the projects he has worked on.

Both the arguments for dynamic and static languages as presented here are vacuous.
Yeah, that definitely improves the experience. Searching for locations is pretty entertaining right now. Lots of people connecting with others nearby.
"shady" refers to a moral or legal issue . . . these are technological issues, and need to be thought of as such.
I wouldn't be surprised if they already have something in the pipe, seeing as how they already have this:

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
No, they are not optimized for hitting rock walls.

They are optimized for keeping costs low, getting reasonable performance and gas mileage, and meeting government safety standards.

A car that is optimized for hitting a rock wall would get about 1 mile per gallon and have a top speed of 1 mile per hour.
That's what you'd call laying pipe.
Cheap envelopes printing. envelopes printing, custom envelopes printing
His observations are actually true of any tool, not just "git". I want everything I use to be robust, and not magical. (About the only exception is perl, and that's because it is actually designed to be a Swiss army knife. But even here, I've moved more toward python.)

Magic is the enemy of scripting, too; not only in shell scripts when running programs, but in other languages when calling functions. It is very hard to work around things that have stupid side effects. Every program/API should have basic functions, with no default behaviors that are even slightly unpredictable.

Output format is also related to this flexibility. For instance, to me, a program that does something useful, but then chooses to pretty-print all its output in hard-to-parse tables, has severely limited its value. (After all, if I wanted it pretty, I could pipe to a program that makes it pretty. Then again, it's more likely I want to use the data for something else first.)
I have to say this is pretty awesome. I just created a public wave with a question in regards to the Reuters Newswires pricing structure, and the first people already replied.
So what's the problem with the link that shows up in the google search? itpints is giving me twitter, boston.com, and the guardian, among others. The feature you seem to like is the ability and lack of self-consciousness for people to say 'something' that Twitter allows, rather than the live search it has. I think if mibbit searched conversations, that would do the same thing and have the possibility to be more valuable.
Yahoo's Pitch To Startups And Developers
Define 'easy to trash'. I've been using MyISAM without problems for years now.
Your statements are all false and I can refute them later when I am not on my phone.

If you want to criticize neural nets as tricky and confusing to newbies with a steep learning curve, that is fair. But it's irresponsible criticism like yours that has given neural nets an undeserved bad reputation in the machine learning community.
See the works of Luis von Ahn (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/), specifically his GWAP project (http://www.gwap.com/gwap/). He has created several web games that provide training for machine learning algorithms while at the same time entertaining users and brining them back for more. The games are very successful, and from the talk of his I heard, it sounds like the data is proving useful.
Dynamic restful routes
This is a good read and uses lots of examples from one of the BSDs (NetBSD as I rememeber).
'Naked' scanner in airport trial (auto-starting video)
I agree that whatever you optimize for early, you are probably stuck with later.

There are more than three vectors. "Good" could mean reliable, secure, highly functional, or many other things. Picking any three vectors and analyzing the tradeoffs helps to figure out how to apply resources.
Hey! Thanks for posting your notes. You pretty much captures all the important ideas.
No, the point about how some entrepreneurs have a sense of entitlement. I think people reacted poorly to that here because they interpreted it as 'how dare you ask angels for investment', which would be offensive considering how many people struggle just to become ramen profitable, often for a long time before cashing in, if ever. Then there are other people who want to be compensated on the basis of projections rather than receipts. It's a blurry line since we know some companies where the founders make $$$ long before reaching positive cash flow.

As far as the 'pay to pitch angels' go, maybe they'd be better off describing themselves as a capital sourcing service or enterprise microcredit bureau or something, since people take 'angel' to mean someone willing to help when you've got nothing. I empathise with the tedium of dealing with self-promoters who think they're god's gift to business despite having money; on the other hand surely the payoff of being an angel is having founding capital in the one project out of 50 or 100 that hits the jackpot and eventually goes public.
I've wondered for a while about some hybrid push/pull distribution scheme. I have 100 followers, just push. Oprah has 1M, 1% of which are currently active, pull. Sounds complicated, but feasible.
It's interesting to see Adam Pearsall join their board. I thought typically investors didn't get board seats at the seed level. Not saying it's a bad thing, just curious.
"Yes! Twitter has singlehandedly changed the game! Before twitter, people didn't communicate online. And you couldn't leak stuff and have it indexed by google."

No-one's saying that. Twitter has increased the extent and intensity of that communication. And that is incredibly important, especially when you're dealing with PR (and i'm sure that's no the only area).
Ask HN: Face2face app feedback before/after Startup School
We are a Manila-based startup building Insync (Google Apps meets SharePoint) best described as FTP/email attachment/USB drive replacements for syncing and sharing targeting companies. I'm attending Startup School and wanted to talk to potential customers/attendees before and after Startup School as part of our "get out of the building" process (and make the best use of my time in Silicon Valley).

We have done some customer development work using a prototype (and signed a few beta customers) but we now have a more "polished" product in private beta.

I'm reaching out to the HN community for 2 reasons:
1) We need (more) feedback/criticism - if you are interested in helping test, please email me at terpua [at] xackup [com]. Ideally, you are a company with 3 or more people. Sorry in advance for making the sign up process cumbersome.

2) As part of the testing and feedback, we wanted to set up a "feedback booth" (coffee shop, etc.) in SF or Mountain View for a day or two and receive face2face feedback (from HN users, as well as others) in 15 - 30 minute blocks.

Is this a crazy plan?
scaling is hard. this is why, for the non-technical audience... also the post ends with "brave new world." yuck.
Likelihood ratio not strong enough at this point. There's a reason why physicists don't go with the usual p-value of 0.05, and that's because, at that level, most of your results are coincidence. If you really take your science seriously, 0.0001 is a reasonable level.

Big kudos to the study authors for graphing the likelihoods in explicitly Bayesian terms, so that the above is fairly clearly spelled out. They've found something that's worthy of further investigation, just in case. But for now, I'd take bets at pretty heavy odds in favor of this not going anywhere.
Here are the screenshots. It's available as a .deb, and right now looks like a web browser trying to be a desktop manager:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/10/chromeos-pictures-google....
Meeting With The Bobs? Gmail Will Now Make Sure You Contact The Right One.
I think the trade off between push/pull is influenced by the ratio of the 'velocity' of data (how frequently it changes) to its access frequency.

If accessed frequently, but changes less frequently, then push makes sense, if changes frequently, but accessed infrequently, then pull makes sense.

It also seems likely that the same piece of data may have different ratios from different perspectives.
It's also an honor to be one of the attendees. Really looking forward to your talk and hopefully meeting you too, Jason.

Many of us will probably never get into an accelerator or attract funding, but we are more than capable of starting great businesses funded by our customers. I think you may be best positioned to address our situation.

Last year, DHH's talk about the Fortune 5 Million resonated the most for me. I'd love to hear more along those lines.

Many of us have read "Getting Real" and your blog, but are always thirsty for more. Bootstrappers would love to hear what's worked best for you (and what didn't work so well) regarding marketing, development, scaling, and deployment.

I bet you have lots of great lessons to share. Looking forward to hearing them.
Or Chrome ;)
Gmail Labs: Got the wrong Bob?
Facebook 'cuts student drop-outs'
I was reading between the lines I guess...
And now, some smoking guns (or “part two of angels that charge”)
I'm curious about this too -- I've used MyISAM for many projects without a problem.
Lizards filmed 'walking on water'
Could high-frequency trading code cause another meltdown?
The FreeType 2 font rasterizer is beautiful code. Geometric computation meets performance optimization meets just-well-written-and-commented C.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freetype/freetype2.git/tree...
"Why it Pays to be Good" - Alexis Ohanian @ Startup Bootcamp [SlideShare]
I'm a little confused on the story behind this since I originally read it: Trafigura dumped toxic waste and tried to reach a settlement regarding the dumpage. There was something that happened in Parliament and for some reason the Guardian wasn't allowed to write about the actions in Parliament because of a gag order.

If someone could be so kind as to answer the following questions:

Why was this in Parliament?

What was the question about this in Parliament?

Who requested the gag order?

Under what precedent was the gag order issued?

Would the courts likely have upheld the gag after an initial hearing?
If anyone is interested in experimenting with something like this in Europe, please drop me a line.

I would like to setup something between a co-op, coworking space, hacker space and incubator, preferably in a small city.

Some things that would be provided:

- Good location, somewhere not too urban

- Separated work and living quarters, a little overlap is ok

- Projection room, conference room

- Broadband + backup 3G connections, local VPN, file-server/NAS

- A couple dedicated servers for web development

- Groceries/food/etc, some provided for free, optional combined shopping list for those that want to save money and time

- Communal cooking/lunches/dinner, maybe a dedicated cook

- Cleaning service on-demand

There's lots of exciting possibilities, once you find a few good people to do this with. If any of the above sounds good to you, I'd be glad to discuss further.
It's true, but since everybody has access to the test images (so they can label them), and the models (through google earth), it seems like anybody can train whatever algorithm they want on the same set.
Mykeytech
Ryan Tomayko recommends Unicorn as a reference for Unix programming (primarily, signals and sockets):

http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix

I found Sinatra to be an interesting read (and specifically how it parses the app configuration into methods):

http://github.com/sinatra/sinatra
Equally or more valuable than trying and sit down to read the kernel source is to follow the patches and discussions thereof on the linux-kernel mailing list: http://lkml.org/

I've found that doing so a) improves my knowledge of what's going on under the hood tremendously, and b) has taught me a fair bit about how to do code reviews and make difficult design decisions. Studying the kernel itself line-by-line would take ages, but reading a few threads a week depending on what piques my interest is totally manageable.
"Hacker village" has kind of a nice ring to it.
It's a (perhaps undo) attempt to purge non-HN type stories from HN. It's a kind of not very useful or productive hobby.
If you look at the original paper Section I. Modeling deviations from GR, their equation 1 gives the metric they've decided to use for this paper. This equation contains 2 "Newtonian potentials describing temporal and spatial perturbations to the metric." In other words, the paper is about testing Newtonian parameters. They refer to this paper as the source of their equation 1:

Cosmological Perturbation Theory in the Synchronous and Conformal Newtonian Gauges by Ma and Bertschinger. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9506072 Again, it's about Newtonian parameters.
It's cheap for the same "reason" English words are unspellable: arbitrary history.
Fair enough. I guess I will just have to learn to take HN articles on science with much much bigger grains of salt.
We just undid three months of dev work, here is what we learned
thanks, that's some interesting information. that does strengthen the OP's case.

Loose coupling should be possible but a rarely seen feat I reckon for websites of this scale.

I wonder how "loosely" coupled and well architected the 2.0 sites are like digg and facebook?
I'm still pretty wet behind the ears, but looking through Quake source (and quake 2), was quite the experience. I though the code was beautiful, as well as impressed with how DRY everything seemed to be....oh, and variable naming, small things like that, really impressed me.
Building 3d models is becoming a necessary feature on modern maps. In fact Microsoft Virtual Earth had 3d models a long time before google did - though is stupidly only works on explorer. There are many players in this arena. I submitted this a few weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800705

Some companies are actually setting up click-shops in 3rd world countries to get them to create the models.

All that said I don't believe that 3d models are a killer feature for maps b/c they don't help you very much in day to day decisions. But make no mistake, there are a number of companies who are spending billions of dollars on large scale mapping operations that will give us incredibly rich information.

Personally I believe that the map will become the interface to most data we consume. We exist in the world, and the map will be our link to it's underlying data. I believe the geo-browser will one day trump the web browser. Or the web browser will become a geo-browser.
Domain Specific Languages for Domain Specific Problems
So all we've really done is replace that lot with the word "Beta".
The trending tags on twitter just mean lots of people re-tweeted something. It's the equivalent of emails that say you should forward it to 100 friends to get good luck. In this case it was "You should be outraged by this, re-tweet it!". But the effect is the same.

That's a very good comparison in fact.
Microsoft's Sidekick/Pink problems blamed on dogfooding and sabotage
I don't treat is a novel, but a reference. I'll often wonder how certain things are implemented, and I'll poke around for the data structures and algorithms until I gain some understanding of how it works.
I'm reminded of the Latin phrase "Age quod agis", literally "Do what you are doing."

It has been my experience that half-hearted attempts to learn/do things end up taking twice the effort of making an honest attempt and getting real results.
I think it's win-win. Google gets data and somebody somewhere is happy to be doing something more productive than FarmVille or some other wacky Facebook game people like you and I avoid like the plauge. Hell, I'd pit building makers against each other by having leaderboards of number of buildings, average building rating on a 5-star scale, etc.
If I were you, I would have commented after finishing up with the phone.
Congrats, guys. Empty/fill those basements!
Depending on how much us humans contribute, there might not be much left for the bots.
I'm guessing you were modded down for implied snark, but it's well worth asking how a small project becomes a big project with no noticing, or noticing but not taking appropriate action.

It happens to the best of us, the feature creep, the must-haves, the rush to ship. So, does agile actually fail to address this, or is this something subtle that manages to evade detection despite better practices and intents?
Good stuff to know. Thanks.
That reminds me that I saw a wolf slinking out of a graveyard in semi-urban shoreline Westbrook, CT, just the other month.

Apparently, wolves are moving back down from the wilds.

I know it was a wolf by the distinctive walk & size, as it crossed in front of my car.

I might have followed the wolf, but (a) I was driving, (b) it was a wolf, and (c) it was a dark and misty night with the mist hanging over the graveyard. OK, I'm a coward. ;-)
Do you have any specific ideas in mind that you guys just don't have time to tackle?
Nice. Free HDTV every week now? :D
German firm offers Europe's first 'personalised paper'
Outsourcing research isn't that crazy: http://www.netflixprize.com/
I had a blog up until a couple years ago. But I eventually decided the risk/reward equation was way out of whack. Especially given how easy it is to offend some people.

That’s what it came down to for me. Every blog post became "is this worth losing my job, friends, etc... over if I potentially offend someone?" Once I determined the answer to that question was almost always no I decided to ditch the blog.

(and it's also why I don't Tweet)

Hopefully FedEx has a management team that is understanding enough not to fire this poor guy. Because a lot of companies are willing to cut someone loose at the mere hint of controversy.
David Hanson: Robots that "show emotion"
What sort of shape are they in?

I think the larger units are the most interesting. The chances of fostering success go up linearly with more entrepreneurs but there is also a much greater chance of having synergistic effects.