skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like most comments here talk about the "intuitive" aspects of the design. Which I agree with -- an app should ideally be intuitive.

That said, being intuitive really only is an issue during the user's learning curve. As every vi/emacs user knows, sometimes you can be way more productive once you adapt to the computer, rather than the other way around. Gmail, for instance, has a very poor UI from a traditional perspective, but I find it very easy to be productive once I learned the keyboard shortcuts.

Intuitive is generally a good thing, but in and of itself isn't the most critical requirement for being usable, IMO. I prefer clustering of concepts, simplicity of presentation, and workflow optimization much more important.

But I still try to design my apps to be intuitive. After all, why not build on common concepts?
How does this compare to Google's protocol buffers, or Facebook's Thrift serialization framework?
Functional Programming in VB.NET
There is much truth to that, and you have to expect some exaggeration in numbers. However http://scienceblogs.com/whitecoatunderground/2009/10/whats_t... points out that pediatric deaths from flu this year are pacing about twice a normal year, and are accelerating. So there is a real issue. Similarly in certain areas hospitals are running out of ER beds. That's highly unusual and is objective evidence that there is a real problem under the hype.

When all is said and done, though, I'd expect a death toll somewhere in the 50-100,000 person range. Which sounds horrible, but is a pretty small fraction of the population. For comparison it is on par with traffic fatalities in a 2 year period, or normal flu fatalities over 2-3 years.

But that number could go up sharply if a lethal mutation emerges and spreads as happened in 1918.
You got a flu shot, got another strain of flu a whole 45 days later, and you think that there's a connection? I'm sorry, but this isn't evidence; it's the exact same cognitive failure mode that convinced people that dances and sacrifices could control the weather. You were in a high-risk environment, with lots of flu strains circulating around, and you probably just got unlucky that year.
The P in P(X) and P(Y) IS actually the same P. It represents the probability of the underlying sample space. X and Y are random variables mapping from that sample space to the real line. P(X=x) is shorthand for P(X^-1(x)).
Roprietary Lingo Can Confuse Investors
You can't be successful until you have some sort of finality; a cash out, a merger... something that adds to the bottom line (besides investors). Twitter is building a huge base on which to make a pretty good size company that does some pretty cool things... So my answer is "So far; they are successful"
Twitter’s Chief Talks About Lists, Traffic and Revenue
A friend of mine from high school (we're both at different colleges now) and I have put on a few local theater plays. If you keep your costs low enough and can find actors for free, you can make some decent money (couple grand).
wow, awesome UI, I looked at source but saw that you minified most of your js. How did you do that sliding panel nav? Do any jquery plugins that you recommend?

I do a lot of jQuery as well but have been frustrated lately by how it's simplicity sometimes also makes it hard to maintain. For example as your app grows, you'll inevitably run into problems where your selectors no longer work because of refactoring and etc... Have you faced the same challenges? If not, what do you do to keep down the complexity?
It may be better to "pay" for your application by taking that money out of the organization by donating, "losing", or burning it.

Only when the money actually disappears will you be able to have a good feeling for how the price affects decision making.

edit: I think it would be better to burn the money than donate it to eliminate the positive reinforcement donating would provide.
For the quiz builder, I think brainbench is commonly used for this - creating good exams is a difficult problem.

I personally think contributions to existing open source is the best idea for small projects. imho most apps that are started from scratch require a while to get really useful.
Don't just roll the dice - a usefully short guide to software pricing
> The money is typically locked away in the country where they're residing. That money can work as investment money.

Investment money isn't as good as money spent for goods. There is limited demand for loans and stocks without a corresponding rise in productivity.

Try making an economy where people don't spend anything and simply save. Or you can save yourself the trouble and see how well that worked out for Japan in the 90's.

> You're also forgetting about the taxes they pay.

Many illegal immigrants don't pay taxes. Immigrants as a whole are paid less (very few are unique geniuses that are paid more), which means that they are actually netting less tax money than if a native was hired. They are also on a lower tax bracket so that is a double whammy.

I really don't see how anyone could be arguing otherwise unless they were trying to exploit H-1B labor themselves.
"monopolies only happen because of government enforcement." Yes, except when the government breaks 'em up. Trust-busting, anyone? See Standard Oil, or for that matter, the Sherman Antitrust Act. I'm really sick of this hearing this. It's like the unabated capitalism of the 19th and 20th centuries never occurred.

You talk as though the government arbitrarily picks which corporate entities will become powerful monopolies and which will fail. Last time I checked, the market--that mystical thing people like you so dutifully worship--renders such judgment. What you perceive should is some kind of government patronage, usually at the level of individual politicians, that allows a monopoly situation to arise in the first place, is actually corporate interests intervening in political life for the purposes of fostering a monopolistic agenda and practice. Look at any political campaign. Where does much of the funding come from? Why do corporate interests fund both parties? Simple, to gain a political foot-in-the-door, so to speak. Hell, look at many government advisorial position. Most are occupied by former (although still share holding) CEOs. And corporate directorial boards? They contain former politicians, many with considerable ties to political figures holding office.

"as far as being blatantly predatory, unless the site actually lies there isn't a problem. if telling half truths is morally wrong then you have some bigger demons to grapple with"

Your cavalier attitude toward this kind of behavior is sickening, at best. If you feel exploitation in any form is justified, then you will have to deal with whatever comes your way, chief.
After Firefox 3.6 - new font control features for designers
The observation isn't inconsistent with the facts about vaccination. Flu vaccines can't protect against every strain you might encounter, and it's a simple matter of probability that there are going to be a lot of people who get vaccinated for the first time, get a flu that year, and stop getting vaccinated from then on.

This is why anecdotal evidence on this issue is worthless. Worse than worthless, actually, since it distracts from the proper statistical approach to thinking about vaccines.
Is there an implementation that will target the iPhone?
It looks like this is some kind of "valgrind for race conditions". Not the most original of ideas, but I bet the implementation involved a ton of hard work. Too bad it's currently Windows-only.
Might be good to turn this into a voting poll? I plan to get both flu shots this year.
> if someone came up with (otherwise acceptable)
> changes to get rid of the GIL I wouldn't object.

that was the big news for me.
Keywords are punctuation for programs. Keywords in capitals are shouting the punctuation out instead of the words. So just as you say, keywords in capitals are the equivalent of you writing:

I think making the keywords all DASH caps is a mistake PERIOD Capital letters draw the eye EMDASH all DASH caps doubly so COMMA and at the expense of readability PERIOD
Ask HN: How will social media change TV?
So a bit of background. I left Comcast earlier this year to start an advanced TV application development company. We build applications that run on newer connected TV's and interactive apps on cable set-top-boxes. At the last minute I got asked to fill in on a panel at a large cable event on the role of Social Media in television.

I have my own feelings and ideas on this subject, but I've been head down in this field for a long time that I might have blinders on. So I ask you, how do Twitter, Facebook or Digg change the way (or can change the way) you view and or interact with TV? What do you think the future is of social media on TV?

Some ideas I have that can be used to stimulate discussion.

Digg style content polling to address finding new content.

Twitter and Facebook grouping to find and share content

New ways to add revenues to shows via in-show enhanced ads (yes TV popup ads, they're coming whether you like it or not)

Integration of social media in new "over the top" systems like boxee or Roku.
That's such a small cost compare to loosing net neutrality.

The internet right now is a leveled playing field. Having all access to all website no matter big or small is good for the entrepreneurs.

If only the "premium" subscribers can have access to smaller websites, internet start-ups will have a much harder time reaching audiences.

I have trouble understanding how, as a start-up lawyer, you can sit there and watch big corporations eating your business away.
The added risk of getting the flu. It well and truly sucks to get the flu, even if it's not much worse than usual.
Gartner Sued Over Magic Quadrant
Perhaps instead of reading stories, you should look for evidence. Then you would see that such stories are incredibly rare among the population at large.
I have done that before. Not a problem, just something I check when I see it. Like your idea though, definitely will try it out once I get access to Twitter.
http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.0/ansicl/ansicl...

Please tell me which part of it is "inaccessible".
My last startup was a company called IMSafer http://www.imsafer.com. We built an entire product around extensive and extremely complicated regex's to find patterns of language that might indicate a sexual predator going after a kid. The only tool that was useful to me was Regex Buddy http://www.regexbuddy.com. Downside is that it doesn't run on the Mac, but I'm telling you for creating and debugging regular expressions it is THE tool to use. We had to optimize not only for matching, but for performance and as you know if you write your regex's wrong, you can kill performance. Regex Buddy has a debug mode that lets you see all the steps taken by the regex and lets you find ways to optimize. Highly recommended.
There is a lot of value in mutable semantics. However when you go to share code, there is a lot of room for bad interactions between packages as well.

The principle that only one person gets to be clever at a time holds in spades when you start changing semantics and/or syntax.

This problem is lessened quite a bit with a language like Lisp which has a uniform syntax. It is at its worst with a language like Perl with a very non-uniform syntax. (Yes, there actually are several ways in Perl to change the semantics of the language on the fly.) However even with Lisp you can encounter issues, particularly if people are using reader macros. (This is one of the reason that the Lisp community uses reader macros so sparingly.)
Lots of people are dying of vaccine-preventable disease. They are quite obviously not dying, or even getting sick, from vaccines, except in extremely rare cases.

So, that's a terrible policy.

Edit: removed inflammatory language. Sorry.
Maybe someone could tell me why Pay-As-You-Go Internet would be a bad thing. I am genuinely confused as to why net neutrality and Pay-As-You-Go are bad.

We would have net neutrality, and with this new payment plan, you would get all of the bandwidth that you pay for. If you want to spend lots of time watching movies or doing voice chats while playing online games, then you would pay for that. More importantly, your neighbor would not feel the bandwidth pinch when you are doing these things. Neither would your neighbor be paying for your extra bandwidth usage. This entire system seems win-win all around. This is not my area of expertise though.

Is there someone who could tell me what I am missing?
Such virus would probably kill you pretty fast anyways.

I don't know about THC, but alcohol is definitely a poison (400+mg/dL of blood should induce respiratory failure, coma and death [1]).

It would be hard to regulate the overall alcohol production originating in independent self-replicating nanomachines.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_alcohol_intoxication
Why? Because he wants to reach an audience? He didn't say "If you want 5 bucks, could you vote for it on Hacker News?". If don't like it, don't vote for it.
If you think this is awful, could you flag it on Hacker News?
I am surprised the cans are so stationary as the tray moves...
I don't know what to think of this. Sure you are working to get this working and you deserve to be paid for it... but so does the actors. In my opinion, you were making money on the back of other people's dream.
I'm a Mac guy but Windows 7 has impressed me. They've made the speed on par with XP and made the interface much less cluttered and non-sensical.
Ignite Show : Geek Culture in 5 Minute Videos
"Don't forget about remittance."

Remittance doesn't help the US dollar. It hurts the US dollar. As foreign exchange banks need to make a profit, for every USD -> Rupee exchange, they are giving you less rupees for your dollar. Its just like buying gold. If a bunch of people start buying gold, the price will skyrocket against the currency you are buying it with.

" but simply that the number of jobs tends to be proportional to the size of the population. New people == new jobs."

Sorry but I don't believe that. More people does not necessarily equate more jobs. If you have a city that has food and water for 500 people, you are bound by that restriction. Adding another 500 people to it would not increase any jobs.
Raytheon Sends Android To Battlefield
I'm not sure I want search results to be littered with tweets. Am I the only one? How do you apply page rank/relevance etc to 140 chars?
That reminds me of CPL, which used the section symbol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_sign).
I do freelance tutoring on the side. Eventually, I'll put up a website and write some materials for sale.
But doesn't a higher savings rate infuse money into credit markets? B's $1 in savings is at least $1 available for capital and consumer credit alike, and with fractional reserve rates, even more.

Most of the boom that preceded the current bust was fueled by credit expansion - and the bust was largely due to poor risk assessment, not the high availability of credit itself.
Same way as any other service industry: standardize and automate. You can't automate much of the physician to patient interaction, but there are a lot of ancillary activities such as record keeping and billing which currently create huge costs for no direct benefit in patient care. Most of that clerical work could potentially be automated.
I read the last word as non-sensual and was wondering WTH you were takling about.

I need more sleep.
It's not. It's just another tactic to scare the general public away from the issue of net neutrality.

"Oh no, my internet fee will raise? F___ net neutrallity. I don't even know what that is."
Info leak in all browsers allows you to check if your friends watch porn
You can do that with GitHub already. Just go to the repository -> admin -> service hooks and set up the email one. Here's a pic of the screen: http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Service_Hooks_for_kneath...
And that, is the American dream.
You can watch tomorrow's Biz Tech Day on Justin.tv
I didn't see the value of this talk. There were no great insights into the "post-crisis consumer".
you can see the double sided tape in the first video
While I have personally never programed life critical stuff, I interacted closely (on the algorithmic side) with people who did. This was in the railroad industry.

They used a subset of C (no malloc...) and had a safety certified compiler. If you crash two trains because of a compiler bug at least you can pass the bunk. They did not use formal proof methods.

The documentation was massive, substantially longer than the code, to the extent that doing the actual implementation from the documentation seemed relatively trivial. Writing and analyzing the documentation on the other hand... I had the impression that writing documentation to that level of detail must have taken substantially longer than implementing it directly in code. And this was probably a good thing as it forced people to think more about every details.

Once a system was written it had to be certified. Any changes, no matter how trivial, meant you had to go through the whole certification process again: slow, painful and expensive.
I would love to see the day when we can calculate the Hamming distance to deadliness for all the common flu strains, so we'll know exactly how alarmed we should be each year.
Do you have anything written up about being a franchise owner? I've heard of a couple people doing quite well, but I'm not sure what kind of effort goes into it.
google's unladen swallow targets LLVM, and apple is now sponsoring work on LLVM, which they might be using to target iPhone ... so it could become a reality in the near future :)
I'm not affiliated with them, but if you want zero-knowledge, encrypted dropbox-esque storage (and a few other benefits) you might try spideroak instead.
the use case discussed in the article seems to be exactly the one for tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/), that is encrypted remote backups. the only upside is this this awkward setup is free (or ~ 1 dollar a month cheaper), though at the cost of being much more adhoc.
>> "They've made the speed on par with XP"

That's impressive? :) being comparable to an 8 year old OS?
Then you're not paying attention. No one (except a broken minority) said that they would not want to get rid of the GIL so long as single threaded performance was note degraded. Guido himself has stated this time and time again. The one thing missing to all the bright ideas and suggested ways of doing it?

A patch.
All covered in this blog post: http://github.com/blog/531-introducing-bert-and-bert-rpc
I would say it's more of a formally-specified mature pretty-fast implementation of half of Common Lisp.
If you are running your code in an iPhone environment and ever want to modularize code. (Say having a tab in someone else's app without revealing your source) Not having XIBs makes using a static library much easier and cleaner.
As soon as the SDK agreement doesn't ban interpreters, I could see such a thing coming, but not from -core
From what I have read, GvR and other core Python people are in favor of removing the GIL, but the solution to removing the GIL has to not hurt performance CPython and must not cause any regressions. Some have worked on replacing GIL, but have not finished the work.
Trying to draw trends from a single cause of death is much harder than it sounds. Particularly in the case of things like influenza, which rarely kill anyone directly.

What you'd really need are actual electronic medical records, so you could track symptoms, progression, treatments, etc.
Being able to keep speed the same after adding tons of features is very impressive for any software, let alone an OS.
Put my design engineering company on part time 6 months ago to start a new company selling a new type of eco-friendly lawn seed.

http://www.earthturfco.com

Stays green and low growing without fertilizer or chemicals.

Built and sold coat racks when I was a kid.
Ouch, it burns the eyes.
Growing up my family saw some rough times. We were living in a small city when the local economy collapsed, and my Dad was out of a job. So, he took the last bit of money he had, bought a trailer, put a hitch on the car, and started a small landscaping company.

Less than six months later, we moved from the smallest house my family had ever lived in, and into the largest house we ever lived in; in a down economy no less.

I don't know that my father ought to be considered a "serial entrepreneur" as he was never trying to get rich -- only to provide for us, but he did similar things on several occasions whenever push came to shove. More importantly no matter the job climate, he always either found or created enough work for himself to support the rest of us.

The lesson I take from this is: when your job sucks or even outright ceases to exist, if the job market is bone dry and the economy is in decline, it might really be the best time to create your own business. (And,.. you'll never know unless you try.)
Please, do not insult our intelligence.
Ask HN: Can I rent your garage?
My friend and I, from Menlo Park, are working on an automated machining process and are looking for a place to set up shop.

Noise precludes us from using commercial office space, and commercial industrial space can be a bit expensive.

Anyone have any suggestions for renting exclusive access to a space we could use?

I was hoping that in the time-honored tradition of the peninsula, someone might lend a garage...

Thanks!
I am part of a company that manufactures canoes for competitive racing. It's been two years and we are doing well enough to live off the business. The most positive aspect is that we have 7 months of backorders. Our biggest problem is trying to expand without funding or loans. Another major hurdle is increasing production without a loss in quality.
[0910.1589] How many universes are in the multiverse?
Here's a compiler: http://code.google.com/p/shedskin
Wouldn't it be nice if it let me use VLC which supports damn-near everything?
Wow, what is with the semi-related links at the end of every single paragraph of that post?
Do you notice you just re-linked the hyperspec on Franz instead of Lispwork's site?

I thought you'd link to this, which is better:

http://www.franz.com/support/documentation/8.1/doc/contents....

...which I'd say is probably the best of the online manuals.

But more to the point:

There are minor issues with the formatting of the hyperspec no one's bothered fixing. Aside from the lack of a pretty stylesheet and the lack of wiki-style user comments

The most obvious is that if I eg go to the Strings or Array section it just gives me a page with a sub-table of contents; it'd be a lot friendlier to have all the Array or String docs on a single html page.

This wouldn't even be that hard to implement, and the "moar docs on one page" approach to online docs keeps winning out for a reason (it's easier to find what you're looking for if you only know approximately where it is if you can get everything that might be related on a single page and ctrl-f your way through it; having deeply-nested content is far unfriendlier).

I do think the hyperspec is not very well-thought-through as end-user documentation.

It mixes levels of concerns that ought to be separate; someone reading documentation with the goal of finding out if there's a built-in function for "split a string delimited by a particular character into a list of strings?" has very different requirements from someone who needs to know how strings are implemented, for example.

IMHO the hyperspec tries to do both; it's fine as a nitty-gritty reference but could be improved as a day-to-day programmer's reference.

Python's docs are a good example of end-user documentation done right. They have a clearly-delineated split between the language specification ( http://docs.python.org/reference/index.html ) and the standard library specification ( http://docs.python.org/library/index.html ) and additional, separate documentation over lower-level aspects of implementation.

Each body of documentation is organized for the convenience of its typical user.