skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Nobel Peace Prize committee have done the world an important service today, by reminding us how meaningless and fickle most awards are, no matter how much prestige they are supposed to carry.
So anyone could just hit the rsvp url and submit the form and be in? Is that why tons of us who received acceptance emails are now seeing rejection notices on the rsvp page? Cause our spots were taken by people who happened to be awake and found the rsvp url? Seems more than a little unfair.

Edit: Nevermind, works now. Thanks! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871433
Also can't submit anything today: I get an error message that say: You are submitting to fast but I have no submits today.
Prolog with manual control-flow semantics :-)
Continuous Testing with RunCodeRun
(Disclaimer - I am the owner of Mechanical CSS)

Thought I would open the discussion here - who actually likes the syntax used in these libraries? Personaly I'm not a fan of extending the language syntax for new features. Adding new features I like but at least try and stick to CSS's style.

(Comparison - http://github.com/stuartloxton/Mechanical-CSS/)
Worked for me, too! See you guys there!
look at it from both sides- wouldnt be in court if it wasnt controversial
Acer may also be the #1 maker because they make lots of laptops that are sold under other brandnames.

For example, they make the Macbooks for Apple.
Early adopter pilotfish: pornographers vs. SEOs
Keep in mind: these are proposed features -- as in, proposed by anyone with enough smarts to edit a wiki page -- not necessarily ones that'll make it into 1.2.

That proposal, in particular, is a Big Honking Deal with basically no concrete proposal, specification, or working code. In other words, the chance that Django will grow non-relational database support by March is... not so good.
NYT article on the same - "YouTube: We’re Bigger Than You Thought"

Link:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/youtube-were-bigger...
I see my guess was right, what is the idea ? To make new fellows to give less karma in the beginning ?
Making memories at Om Beach in Phu Yen
Also, no carrier is going to advertise that their phones run the exact same system as another carrier's phone. Why give customers an easy reason to switch?

There are half a billion Nokia users that have no idea what Symbian is.
Tool Smackdown: Pocket Multimeters
Download Eclipse and the SDK (all free), get it all running, then build the "API Demos" project from the samples directory and run it on the emulator.

This program lets you play with every single part of the Android system and UI. Tinker with this for a week or so and you'll have a great introduction to the platform.
Postgres has a GUI tool as well, but it's slow as molasses and has the table-view option in a tree menu, 4 levels down.
They could have taken Time's route and given it to me...
Yeah, it would indeed. There's something cool about seeing something you wrote run on a device, too.

For that matter, J2ME is fun too, because it's a fairly small platform, and there isn't a lot of Java blahBlahBlahFactory() type of stuff.
Busting the ECM Myth
I've enjoyed Hacker News the past year as I worked on KartMe, and now would greatly appreciate your thoughts on this free service for easily organizing and sharing favorite books, restaurants, gadgets, recipes and more. Thanks!

* What would get you to use KartMe every week?

* What would get you to tell a friend about KartMe today?
Hey, it's using my favicon!
It might just be me, but starting a war as a response to a "high state of emotion" after being attacked is more or less the definition of "revenge". That said, I'm not commenting on the legitimacy or lack thereof of the wars, nor am I commenting on the "oil" part of the question.
Probably helps that the ISP was Canadian. Makes it a little harder for the US gov't to bully them around.
Suggestion for a "web os." Take this, or something like it, and put in on an OS where each tab is its own process. Need to install OpenOffice? Fine, but it runs in a "tab." Of course, you can also do some Exposé trick with the tabs. (Isn't the "most visited" page in Chrome and Safari just a sort of web substitute for Exposé?)

Then make a server version! A company with a software toolkit like this could have a key advantage. They could wind up with OS that are 50X more compact, more responsive, yet require fewer resources, while having faster development times and much greater code reuse.
You're absolutely right. I meant to say GTK in my original comment, but I was thinking about Mono because of another Linux project that was on my mind. Anyway, I'll leave the mistake in my comment since you've already corrected it for me.
Arafat was another strange choice.
I guess the perfect situation would be when you plug it in it also shows up as a read-only mass storage with a copy of the driver.
Not open, but an otherwise "free" and official place to get some info regarding a barcode... http://gepir.gs1.org/V31/xx/gtin.aspx?Lang=en-US
I think it was one of the Adams who opined that men go into politics to either help their businesses or hurt the businesses of their competitors.

Of course Obama's real wealth is in those two beautiful girls.
pg said it's fixed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871433). It worked for me when I tried, try again.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07...
The angels I've met are looking for stratospheric upside when there's high risk. Proven, ongoing revenue puts you in the driver's seat. You've cut the risk of an investment dramatically relative to a buying into a couple of 22 year old guys with just a wacky idea that has a minuscule chance of a 100,000% return.

You need a different kind of investor than the ones who are playing startup roulette. They're out there. There's a lot of money looking for a new home.
Certainly the Geneva Convention doesn't have legal force in this case, but I like to think that one can aspire to high standards of behaviour without the threat of legal sanction. In other words, do we obey Geneva Convention rules because we're forced to, or because it's right?
I don't feel that Hacker News is swamped with off-topic discussions. I'm not having to wade through political or social commentary to find articles about Haskell, video adapters or Javascript. In fact, a quick look at the front page indicates that less than 5% of it isn't technical in some way - and more than 80% is entirely technical.

I say we avoid putting things in place to avoid problems we don't have yet :->
Thanks! worked for me. See you there!
An better policy would be for providers to do the above, but by day. (So have a trigger of 1/3rd gigabyte a day.) This way, the penalty isn't too onerous (just the rest of the day) and the feedback/learning loop to their customers will be quicker. Make the cutoff at 3am, and they will effectively train heavy downloaders to use bandwidth late at night.
I'm disappointed they are gone. I used the Pirate Bay as my primary tracker for distributing my music free of charge.
You may be interested in Inform (http://inform7.com/), which is a language specialized for creating interactive fiction games.
This has happened to me several times. Especially in combination with the fact that C++ does not guarantee floating point operations happen the same every time... Argh. So it is unwise to do things like

bool operator()(Foo const& a, Foo const& b) const {
return a.some_float_func() < b.some_float_func();
}

if some_float_func does floating point operations rather than just returning a stored value.
After having launched our product I was spending some time reviewing commits together with the senior tech lead. Still to this day I can recall the commit number, the filename and write down the code from memory responsible for what turned out to be the source of a bug completely wiping out our users computers. Someone had mixed uncommenting a piece of code together with fixing a bug which hid the fact that some horrible code was active in the product. It took us 5 minutes to produce a fix and push it out to the update servers. Did we end up wiping someones computer? Yup, about a dozen known cases including a couple one in-house. I don't even want to think about how many actual cases there were, considering that we had about 2 million downloads of our product before the bug was fixed.
HTML was a bit easier, and few cared about web standards or accessibility- as long as it worked. We didn't have much javascript (and what we had was counters and similar), XML, RSS, Ajax, Rails sites, etc.

Many of the sites were made in something like Frontpage even. There were templates and site makers, but also most people kept the stuff super simple.

And just because it was more complex doesn't mean it wasn't important. It was the easiest thing to come along. Before that you had to set up a web server, buy a domain, etc...
If they got the TDD projects out the door with 60%-90% fewer bugs but only 15%-35% later, it seems like a small adjustment in expectations would get those projects out faster with equal quality.
He has also said that he would be more than happy having Tibet remain an autonomous state of China for reasons of economics.
I highly doubt the developer did this for money. At best
he'll make $1000. I'm guessing he developed the app for himself and just decided to release it. Why not comment about
how it could be better?

My suggestion has already been voiced: Need upvote capability.
Nanny State Says: “Shhhhh That Commercial is Too Loud"
Try a worse version of this - comparing the results of a floating-point function call where the left operand gets moved into the 80bit fp unit during computation, and the right operand stays in register.

Obviously there is a precision difference between the two numbers, enough to make a < b and b < a return true in a surprising number of cases. The way I ended up fixing it was by putting the result of the function call in a member variable in every struct, pre-computing all of the results, and comparing based on that value.
Ask HN: Leaders' avg?
I've noticed that the HN leaders page now reports 'avg' in addition to totals. Is it safe to assume that the avg is total/(posts+comments)?
I think I noticed mine fluctuating, so it might be only tallying recent (for some definition of recent) posts.
A Purple Cow joins forces with a Gaping Void, only greatness results
...putting it's global audience at around 20 billion.

hahaha
Off topic discussions are just that. We didn't come to this site to discuss politics so it doesn't belong here. There are many other places available to do that.

Any suggestions to create an off-topic board is not a solution. These are mostly populated by those who would come to the site based on politics and nothing to do with what Hacker News is about.
What contrast? Other than the fact that Obama doesn't snuggle up with the religious right, I don't see any significant difference between these two guys. A lot of perceived differences, sure. A D instead of an R, yeah. But judging by their far-reaching policy decisions, say, on war, personal freedom, privacy rights, transparency - not so much.
The two App Stores
Obama seems to be a good man with good intent. Awarding him the Peace prize without a clear representation for a big problem he has helped solve does seem out of place. Al Gore didn't actually solve a problem either. Well, unless you count inventing the Internet ;).

The only interpretation I can offer is the Nobel committee wants to show its support for Obama. The 2010 elections are going to be the worst circus we've seen in a long time.
How do you tether using your G1?
The tactics involved in "defending" copyright do more to inconvenience legitimate consumers than pirates.
New outlet for scanner buffs
Another Day, Another Lawsuit Against Facebook (Well, Two)
Dominos Pizza :)
In high school I got a job for my local Department of Public works in the Power division. I lived in a small New England town that did their own power, much like most towns do their own water and sewer.

My job was as an assistant to the inventory guy, a 70 year old feisty man with one hand named Al.

I was often bored when Al would tell me to 'go hide somewhere' so I wrote some software to help him manage the inventory system. The power engineers in charge saw this and after a few small programming assignments had me work on updating the newly installed SCADA control system. This was a specialized programming environment that controlled all the power in the town.

We were setting it up to buy power from the local college during the yearly 'peaks' in August, thus reducing our yearly electrical bill by potentially millions of dollars.

After a month of working on it and incrementally adding my changes I screwed up. I knew this when I submitted a change and all the alarms went off at the substation.

Half the towns power was out. I got it back on after an hour, and nobody called with ventilator issues, so I think there was no real harm done.

The engineer in charge of the department laughed it off when he saw my apprehension about the situation. He said in the grand scheme of things they have made far bigger mistakes than that, probably referring to the blown transformer a couple months earlier.
I first got a rejection, then tried about 10 minutes later and got the accepted page. So... wait around and try again.
Whats being stated here is that there is no forum which combines two things:

1) Things that are off topic for HN.

2) Commentary from people who meat some sort of HN criteria (i.e. able to make reasonable statements and arguments).

Also, it turns out that a good number of people are interested in politics articles and a good number of people here get annoyed with politics articles.

The proposed solution seems to cover both problems. I'm not sure if it will work, but certainly the issue it is trying to address is real.
I'm in TX also, Austin to be specific. My network speed is pretty good but I'm only comparing it to an EDGE connection on my work BB.

The donut release isn't bad. Good performance boost (I wouldn't classify mine as 'huge' but we might use our phones a lot differently). Battery life about the same for me. (I still have a battery charging level issue leftover the from the cupcake upgrade.) I don't know if there were any browser updates in donut but Google Wave on my G1 is very slow to load. (1-2 minutes even on wifi.)
I was mostly comparing the cupcake upgrade to the donut upgrade. There was a huge visible difference between them.

All in all, I love my G1. Way better than my work issued BB. I'm just wanting more. ;-)
Ask NH: Hobo vs. ActiveScaffold for Rails
I blogged about writing my own super-duper-meta package for Rails that abstracted out all the common CRUD/REST stuff that one does over and over in each project.

Someone came along and suggested that I check out ActiveScaffold. http://activescaffold.com/

I was thrilled with the ActiveScaffold folks for not only writing the project, but also point folks to competing projects - how classy is that?!

One competitor they pointed to is Hobo ( hobocentral.net/ ). ...which also looks great.

I've downloaded both and am reading the docs, but I'd like to ask:

Has anyone here used either, and what do they think?

Has anyone used BOTH ?

Thanks!
Yeah, that's like $10,000 to $20,000 in text messages.
A premature Nobel Peace prize
I am, he had a package where each message cost him $5c.
Anytime the effects of code escape into the real world, the result is far more interesting.
Sorry, but if a 7 year old kid wrote this in Flash I might be impressed. JavaScript has light-years to go before it's a viable platform for anything involving animation and graphics, for even the most cursory uses.
Thanks for the confirmation, at least I'm not going nuts.

Would it maybe be an idea to drop the buttons if you aren't going to count the votes anyway ? This feels a bit silly.

If it isn't clear which vote buttons work and which ones are just pacifiers then it might lead people to stop voting completely.
Well, I agree, we are supposed to be the "good guys".

But in response to "there are pretty strict guidelines on the treatment of prisoners of war" - those guidelines, by their own definition, carry no legal weight in this context. Since the Taliban fighters are not uniformed members of the Army of a Geneva Convention signatory, they aren't actually "prisoners of war" for a start...
Aside from the ADP1, are there any Android devices available that allow root access per default?
Your "avg" did not change when I voted you up just now, so it must be averaging over at least 100 posts... I guess that doesn't narrow it down much.
Sounds like a good (interesting) way to get started. Thanks for all the replies.
Running an entire application environment in the browser like this still gives me pause for concern. On the one hand it'd be great for creating an open community where anyone could modify the code (locally) to do cool things, on the other hand it makes it a lot more difficult to control security if there is a server involved in the mix.

And if there isn't a server involved... what's the point of using a browser then?

So this is a neat technology exercise... but to what end?
"Ambiguity, either you have it or you don't."
Hmm.. Maybe because the US government isn't likely to imprison or torture you if you claim the elections were rigged?
How do you drive a second screen? Or, are you counting the laptop's screen?
I can't make any reasonable statement about the likelihood of Yahoo having done this, but it seems easily possible to do in a few minutes. Forget hours, unless there is some fundamental aspect of the data structure used that I'm missing.

For example, I have a nightly process (plain jane RBDMS) that searches over 85 million records to match up with 100K records where the matches may be exact or provide potential matches from the larger table back to the smaller. This process typically takes less than 20 minutes and the system runs on what I would define as relatively average hardware.

I am assuming that the user accounts are logged in some way that keeps them from having to do some awful full text scan of blog comments for each of the 20 million users checked.

[EDIT: Rechecked log files, runtime is 15-20 mins instead of 5]
Just be aware that Android operates in a resource constrained environment, so that some practices (such as avoiding garbage collection through resource pools) aren't typical in desktop or server-side Java applications. Also, if you're going to be doing desktop UI stuff at work, Android's UI APIs are very different from Swing et al.
Because they do nothing to remove any threat that we are currently experiencing, cost an enormous amount of money, lead to strife within the EU, put money in to the pockets of US defense contractors that could be spent better in more constructive ways and that are based on the flawed principle of the 100% kill rate, which means that when the time comes to deploy you simply overwhelm them.
"FreeBSD is generally on-par (or ahead of) Linux"

They are both fairly mature implementations of Unix. It is expected they shown little difference in feature set.

"it's safer to donate your source code to a BSD project because you don't have to donate all of it."

Why would you have to donate all of it? I can donate parts of a program to any project I want. What I shouldn't do in this case is to assign copyright to the project maintainer. Linux kernel developers don't have to assign copyright to the Linux Foundation.

The case for Juniper is that they can simply adopt an OS, customize it as much as they want and give back to the developers that gave this to them whatever the developers they paid wrote that is not part of their secret sauce.

I think for IBM the case is to make it easier to sell xSeries and zSeries servers if they run Linux better. As for the p's, I think they prefer to sell them with AIX. I don't think their service organization benefits much from their involvement.
Well, he may not be a great hacker, but he's not a script kiddie, either. What would you call him?

Edit: at least, the hacker community seems to have adopted him, I think because his situation reminds them of government overreaction in Kevin Mitnick's case.
If it was just the right of center websites saying this, I'd write it off as partisanism.

...but Slate ( http://www.slate.com/id/2231909/ ),

the NYT ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/world/10nobel.html?_r=1... )

the Telegraph ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/b... )

Reuters ( http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE5981JK20091009 )

The Atlantic, the Washington Post, etc., etc., etc. (basically, ALL the media from left to middle to right) are saying that this was an inane decision.

I have to concur.
The NYT report doesn't say that the prize is premature.

Why use a misleading headline for the hn submission of the report ?
The Underappreciated Art of Duct Tape Programming
You have to root your phone, once you do there is an application available for this.

rooting: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=442480

tether software: http://jkontherun.com/2009/03/21/pdanet-for-android-tether-y...

One of the tethering apps at least.
CSI: Doodle - lie detection through art
Activity is not Progress
This is news... just not hacker news.
Optimizing a php application in 5 minutes
We set up a new network segment with multiple VLANs trunked over a fiber line. The entire thing worked flawlessly except for one VLAN. It turned out to be a conflict between a very strict media converter and bad ARP packet-generating code in the device acting as the DHCP server on that VLAN. The ARP packets it generated were too short for the media converter, so it dropped them thinking they were damaged and the computers on the VLAN were unable to find the gateway. The end solution was to go with a dumber media converter that didn't work at the packet level. The DHCP device to this day still has the bad code.
The browser was definitely updated, I notice most browsing is at least a little snappier, though I'm disappointed with the browsing experience overall on the G1.

Battery life is pretty bad, but I pretty much keep it on a charger all day long now anyway, got used to knowing it's going to need a charge regularly, if I'm out and about for a while I'll use locale and power center to trim it down to only the basic needs.

I mostly just use the standard calendar, mail, messaging, remember the milk and a little irc and twitter. but I'm pretty regularly going in and purging applications with TasKill.

I'm in Fort Worth, you're pretty much a stones throw away from me.
So who (or what) is visiting your website?
Look into my eyes: The power of hypnosis
If you don't mind using a PC as a DVD player, AnyDvd strips all that stuff out (along with region coding and most other DRM)
If I would have been in Carters shoes (which clearly I'm not), I would have returned the award with the next postal delivery. It almost turns into a negative prize, you get it for no achieving something bad instead of achieving good.