skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The support pages seem to be full of broken links - but that's Microsoft.com.

An interesting move though - is this good timing or is it in support of Windows 7?

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft has the organisational skills needed to keep something like this up-to-date and current.
This is great.If I ever teach a class I'm going to try to do this stuff.
What is a data storage silent error?
It seems of late everyone is trying to improve on something that is obviously working. ie. Craigslist

Love it or hate it, it's working for them.

Why not examine why it is working so well and take some lessons, and build better products?
Github: push error: unpack failed, unreachable objects
Why The Small Things Matter Most?
SmartClient: The little known uber Javascript framework
We've been using this framework for the last 6-9 months or so and have been very impressed. For whatever reason, it is off the internet's radar, so I thought I would post a link.

Basically SmartClient has everything you need to build a "desktop app in a web app" type of application, complete with automatic data binding & synchronization and all of the main types of controls you'd ever need. Often building a SmartClient app requires just hooking controls up to data sources and letting the framework take it from there. It's LGPL and has been around for almost a decade, so its pretty battle tested. Note that bending it in a direction it doesn't want to go can be a bit painful, but generally we've found that often the problem was just not realizing that what we needed was already there in the framework.

v7.0 RC2 is now available, grab it here:

http://www.smartclient.com/product/download.jsp

There are also GWT bindings, check out SmartGWT. Also see the demos at

http://www.smartclient.com/featureExplorer.jsp
Armstrong on software
The Most Challenging Part of Becoming a Freelance Developer
Leaving my job & starting my own thing
But craigslist already does charge, for job postings in certain cities.
"Do you want to relocate to NYC and work on exciting product at the already profitable startup?"

I think one of the things he's looking for is the ability to work from home.he mentions it very clearly.
Thanks for the thoughts.

To be honest, I'm not really concerned about PHP4 anymore, it's been dead a while.

Thanks giving me an idea for a followup article too, I'll do exactly that, write a small direct application and compare performance with large datasets.

Also, doing this in a purely procedural method would be an interesting article too.
I think how Facebook translated the site is one of the biggest examples of proper crowdsourcing. It does take some expertise - namely knowledge of two languages. But the set of people with that kind of knowledge is definitely big enough to call it a crowd. I'll have to ask internally at Facebook how many people were involved. My guess would be more than 1000.
Twitter restrictions in the real world
Tips From the Twitter Elite
Too bad the funding isn't for doing more good research there
And Chrome encourages MS to improve IE, which is good for Google because most Google software "runs" in IE.
It's funny how much you can see in a few screenshots.

The neglect of UI issues is apparent. I'm really surprised that, with the tiny displays of the day, people weren't outright demanding a more space-efficient UI. It's incredible that so much space could be wasted in windows and menus, with so little actual content. Meanwhile, lots of screen space reserved for company logos, copyrights, scary legalese, and ads.
Yaron interviewed me at Google. It's funny how many people you continue to bump in to in the Valley...
I couldn't stop looking at the clock on the stove in the background jump around to different times
I'm still under the impression that standard tip in the US is 15%, but I usually tip 20% if the service is good, if only because it makes calculations is easier. Shoddy service that's not bad enough to notice is 15%; anything less jumps a quantum level down to zero.
Chronicle-recorder + chronomancer, for hard to catch bugs
Can Twitter Rake in the Ads to Justify $1 Billion Valuation?
If your parents or grandparents purchased a Palm, would they be able to? Anyone who posts on HN is by definition almost certainly a power user.
> Unfortunately, the author seems to be on the verge of falling into one of the fallacies he rightly points out: assuming that one of the main purposes of unit testing is to act as a surrogate for static analysis. I've seen code written in dynamically-typed languages which tries to do this, and such code pretty much universally falls into the category of "using dynamically-typed languages poorly"

Do you think that tests that check if a return value was null are "using dynamically-typed languages poorly"? Because that's very much an example of using tests to verify something the compiler could have proved for you.
out press them, watch this interview from mixergy with the founders of hotornot.com

http://mixergy.com/hotornot-bootstrapped5-million-profits-ja...

once hotornot bootstrapped from the guys front room- funded competitors sprung up everywhere. He talks about getting his site to be the first article that newspapers carried about such a site
You're not the first to try this. Sapphire (the framework powering the SilverStripe CMS) implements this technique and has all of it's DataObject select calls return a 'DataObjectSet' which is basically the equivalent of your DB_Iterator.
TweetSaver.com Launched on MongoDB, MongoMapper
Please no. Listening to someone mumbling incoherently in monotonous broken English for 30 minutes, never once lifting their eyes from the notes in front of them, is not my idea of fun, no matter how brilliant they might be. Not only is it no fun, it is a complete waste of time for everybody involved.

I'd rather listen to an enthusiastic and engaging grad student than a dull, rambling leader in the field.
Misleading.

> Apple has so far called these reports “isolated incidents” and blames overheating batteries or faulty use by device owners.

> That hasn’t stopped Kuneva from taking a strong stand in the matter:

> “I don’t need (Apple)’s permission to stop goods entering the market,” told reporters in Brussels.

> “If goods are dangerous, then we will order a recall. We are checking with labs to see if there is a problem with the phone, with their batteries or if there has been misuse of the device. We need to have 100 percent certainty from one member state that these goods are dangerous.
$1 for each Google search..it'll make them billions!
I don't think its a strength of php to have code portable to older versions of php. New versions mean new features and he's taken full advantage of some of the most powerful features in php5. I'll quote the article "The code in this article was adopted from Artisan System, Leftnode’s PHP5 framework."

I'm curious how many situations where new code is stuck in a php4 environment. PHP4 is getting quite old, and has been end of life'd. Most hosts run php5 or can be asked to upgrade without much fuss. After all it has been years since it came out.

As for iteration of a model vs arrays, having your data in a model has many more advantages then a collection of strings. Chances are you don't need the slight performance you'd gain out of sticking with strings and you'd loose the advantages of working with a framework.

It's like saying ROR is inefficient or slow. The point is frameworks are designed to make development easier. If you need the performance you might gain out of not using the framework, then you're probably at a point where you're past needing a framework to help build your app.
Perhaps, but most bloggers wouldn't bother doing the research anyway. There are two kinds of news sources these days; blogs for instant facts, and real news sources (NYT, etc.) for actual thoughtful analysis. I would never expect the NYT to be first on any story, but I do expect it to be a good read. Usually my expectations are met.

Anyway, TC is not journalism, it's a blog.
China Buys 80 Very High Speed Trains (236 mph) for $4 Billion
How will you deal with the various possibilities for abuse this kind of functionality offers ? (stalking etc).
The bottle with the corkscrew on the inside is my favorite. My best guess is that the corkscrew handle, without the screw, was hung inside by threads. The cork-with-screw was then pressed into place, probably with some glue on the end of the screw. The handle could then be pulled onto the screw with the threads, and the threads pulled out of the bottle.
How is it a threat to open source?
I went through a class with a similar teaching style. I loved it. I sat in the front row each day because I was learning so much. It was in fact the first math class I thoroughly enjoyed.
1+1=?
One of the nice things about the Wikipedia model is that you can materially improve an article on a given topic without actually knowing anything about that topic. I'm no wikipedian high roller, but I've taken a moment or two to clean up the spelling and grammar on several articles over the years.
We have a couple ideas. First is that you only post your location when you want to. We're not going to map every tweet you post on twitter. So a user would only post from our site, or include the hashtag, when they want to be placed on a map.

If that isn't enough for people we are open to including privacy controls, like only allowing people you follow to view your location, but we wanted to see what people wanted from the site before we went down that road.
What value do you derive from documenting the author of each method? That seems like a lot of overhead for very little benefit, especially when your VCS can do an annotation and give you more detail than one comment can.
In what way is it irrational?

The fact that it relies on an absurd belief.

Rabbi's are inspired by God, God created us and inspired scripture and knows what is best.

Yeah. That's the irrational part.

But it is a rational argument, it applies known (to the subject) facts in a logical manner to determine the true course to take.

"God told us to" isn't logic unless God is first proven.

The question of whether God exists is not a scientific question

Yes it is. If God exists, there should be a proof for it. If there is no proof, then there is no God.

"Rabbi's provide bad advice" might be a good first hypothesis - eventually we see that Rabbi's usually provide good advice, should we take that advice? Seems logical (within this limited discourse).

That's a non sequitur. If a rabbi (not a proper noun, by the way) provides good advice, that proves that the rabbi as a human being is wise regarding certain things. I can give terrific personal advice and still not be good at playing the stock market.

Well do we have scientific data which somehow shows his premises to be wrong?

You're invoking Sagan's dragon. The burden of proof is on you, not on reality. Until you prove it right, you are wrong and have no argument to make.

We belive they are wrong but can't readily show they are objectively wrong.

But we can.
"Over 10% of our testers gave us the wrong number as their UDID."

It's not that hard. There's a free app you can put on your device that will email your UDID to where ever you want, or you can just copy it over from iTunes/XCode. I haven't ever had a client give me the wrong UDID (they have given me the same UDID twice though, forgetting that I already have that device in the database). The hardest part usually is that it can sometimes take 5-6 tries of dragging the app into iTunes (on Windows at least) for it to work. But even that isn't too big of a deal, just quick and easy repetitive motion (once they get the profile installed).

I think the biggest pain in the ass is on the developer's side. Anytime you want to run the app on another device, you have to add another UDID to the device list on Apple's site, regenerate your provisioning profile, download it, delete the old adhoc profile from ~/Library/MobileDevices (good luck trying to find out which of the profiles in there is your old adhoc, the files are named with a random string of letters and numbers), install it to XCode, open your project, and change your adhoc build profile settings to the new profile.

Phew.
Maybe because they themselves are early adopters of technology platforms.
Ask HN: Speech as MicroTransaction?
I'm hoping for feedback on my application.
http://www.Chagora.com

(gateway and accounts established but currently site is set so can sign up for FREE with "play money" for demonstration purposes... Try it!)

Premise is simple: Small Money, Large Numbers & Immediate Feedback will change the political dynamic by re-engaging citizens in easy and (especially) frequent participation.

Put on your math hat and consider potentials in networked citizen lobbying.
Model is transaction neutral and account is attractive for ALL User's charitable and political contribution... (also e.g. blog subscriptions which are a function of speech).

I believe can become natural hub but I'm a political theory guy... not an Internet entrepreneur so am looking for some advice...
(and partners if interested)

Chagora blog at http:CulturalEngineer.blogspot.com

P.S. Naturally I'm biased but for all kinds of reasons I think this is a better model than Google's for journalism ( http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/google-developing-a-micropayment-platform-and-pitching-newspapers-open-need-not-mean-free/ ).
And being more optimistic is the scary part especially when you don't have enough money. I wouldn't care much about how much money the guerilla's have got.

Have been through both positive and negative end result on two different products.

On a ecommerce product discovery site ReviewGist.com - we had a technically superior product, reviewed on TC and host of other big tech/startup blogs. But sustenance, financial muscle to extend reach matters a lot. Other VC funded companies marched past us long ago.

On a facebook book reading community "Books iRead/weread.com" we were new, small and of course used no budget. We bet the biggies in the market like goodreads, shelfari, librarythings who were there for long time on internet and well funded.

When it is consumer oriented business there can be wonders. But it is definitely a big red alert to watch for the biggie constantly. You get lucky if they don't do things right.
Chicago-based Sandbox Industries has a new $18MM investment fund
Seriously. I left a comment on the host blog observing that points 2, 3, and 4 are basically the same, and can be summarized as: it's insanely easy to use. I set up Dropbox in about 20 seconds, and it did exactly what it said it would. Compared to every other synchronization tool I've ever used, Dropbox wins not by meters, but by miles.
When I first heard about text messages, I thought the technology would (at best) be used for a brief time and then die once people had email from their phones. I was wrong. It turns out there's a huge market for short, in-the-moment messages. And MMS is just text messages with more flexible bits allowed. Yes, iPhone users will continue to email pics, but they'll also MMS pics like crazy--two entirely different use cases, it turns out.
Bisuness Intelligence and Reporting Tools
The primary reason[...] for coding web applications in PHP instead of Java, Ruby, or Python or what-have-you is speed

This seems like a bad reason: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

PHP even uses more memory than Java on some benchmarks, which is pretty damn impressive. You have to work quite hard to use more RAM than Java.

(You'll also notice that source size of PHP is not much smaller than the equivalent Java program. PHP is a very verbose programming language compared to its other "dynamic language" brethren, and even to non-"dynamic" langauges like Haskell.)
I'm interested in who in this community got access. Perhaps start an invite circle? Or d'you think that's too informal for this community?

(My email address is i.am@me.com, if this gets rolling.)
100,000

(no reason we should all strain our eyes to place that comma)
I think he's wrong about it though. Honestly, craigslist hasn't failed me much. I rarely get spam or ads. When I need to sell something, it has always worked out. Part of the wonder of craigslist is that everyone has access to it. If they charged to post, some people wouldn't pay, and the community would suffer
When discussing a players career though, typically its goals, and appearences per club.
Since Google blocks some rural numbers, and I do believe I am in a region where they block, I am thinking it is not very awesome at all.
Ask HN: How to consolidate logs across server farm?
For various reasons, I need to consolidate a set of php logs from my load balanced servers. I doubt I'm the first to need to tackle this problem, so I wanted to look for some advice on the matter.

What are some good starting points for me to research?
How many of the 2 million users are paying customers? Is dropbox losing money for now because of the 2GB it gives out for free? I believe dropbox will make money but right now it seems that it is still burning money.
A friend asked me for advice: startup or big company
Evolution is subservient to mathematics that governs physics. It merely searches the phenotype space, but that space is structured and constrained. (Number governs all.)
I did not get an invitation. If I do and an invite feature exists, I have no problem spending it on HN people.
Makes sense -- why fight a fight with Apple that they can't win?

There are already plenty of third party sync solutions that will move your music to your Pre. From PreCentral.net: "In other words, we're still leaning towards suggesting people at least dip their toes into the non-iTunes-direct-sync waters. DoubleTwist, Salling Sync, Drag 'n Drop, The Missing Sync: learn them, love them, switch to them."
I have developer sandbox access, but I haven't seen anything about this rollout, nor have I gotten any invites to hand out. If/when I do, I'd be happy to share a few here.
Link to the abstract (w/ PDF download):

http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4555
And there always will be a place to go for free ads, now that it's been noticed as a good idea for a website; whether it's Craig's implementation that survives or not makes no difference. The cat's out of the bag: classifieds can be free.
Humna blood to light it up.
I like the idea, yes- but I am worried about the part of "syncing even when the app isn't open on the computer" (not an exact quote)

That sounds like a HUGE security risk
It's a huge deal for people with friends and family who aren't as tech-savvy and use MMS without even thinking, but go cross-eyed when you try to suggest emailing it from your phone.

Nice work, Tim!
An Idea for a Startup I Would Use
A Yelp for auto mechanics.

Does anyone know of anything like this? I'm currently involved in a dispute with a mechanic. So far, they've been pretty good about it, but I'll wait to reserve judgment until I get actual results, one way or another.

However, regardless of how this turns out, I would like to be able to either give them kudos or bad publicity as the case merits.
I congratulate him for starting his own thing, but it's going to be very hard to get me to leave my google apps group chat. Transcripts are saved and searchable alongside my email. I do wish they'd support xmpp persistent rooms though.
Sounds good. I signed up. Campfire deserves to be superseded. Somehow I always thought Mibbit would be the one to do it, but I guess not.
The homework sounds good.

The best I ever got was "do these odd-numbered problems from the book", which is not quite as beneficial.
Thanks and updated.
Of the two million, half are inactive. Of the rest, most are not close to 2gb or use it lightly, so it´s not that expensive.

Things like LAN-sync will also help driving down costs.

Overall, I think that even if they are still burning money, they could stop doing that and go positive quickly.
Tell HN: Free startup idea
This is a hardware idea and I would have no clue how to execute it. So I'm going to give the idea away.

The problem with physical advertising is that there's no way to measure its effectiveness. For example, I live in Boston, and currently, H&M is advertising at the T-stop near my house. The last time I was at the stop I was thinking "how the hell do they know if that ad is actually sending customers to their stores"? This idea would solve this problem using two small hardware widgets.

The first would be on or near the sign at the T stop. It would pick up, and identify unique cell phone signals within 20-50ft. If it finds a new cellphone, it would record the visitor.

The second widget would be at the H&M store in town (or at all of them!). Whenever a new phone walks into the store, the widget would cross-check the unique signal with a DB and determine wether the user saw an ad this week/month/year.

With years of data, one could measure which ads are effective and which ones are not.

Thoughts?

P.S. There are two assumptions* I made:
1. Each cellphone emits a unique signal.
2. This unique signal can be picked up and detected with fairly straightforward hardware.

*I confirmed these assumptions with a friend who's a hardware engineer at the FCC.
I'd like a wave access invite please. I am nissimk here and on twitter and gmail. thx.
I think you answered your question. Yelp does this.
I got access a few weeks after the rollout at Google i/o.
2gb of storage costs $.24 a month on S3, and you figure they only average about half full. Call it an even $.50 with data transfer costs, and you've got just one paying customer (at $9.99/month) subsidizing ~15 free users. A 1-in-15 conversion rate seems like a modest goal. They may not be losing any money at all.
I would love an invite: davidsmit at google's little mail service.
This is great for China. Hopefully, US will be working in implementing this soon too.
My MOM uses dropbox.. even my dad does.

However, for me it's not so much a sync tool than an auto backup / versioning / web access to your files.
So is this stuff getting folded into Ruby proper? If not, why not?
Old Intel Mac Mini. PPC Macs won't work.
Not sure I agree with this comment 'While Palm hasn't officially responded to the USB-IF's letter - despite being told they had to do so within a week - it seems that they have, without actually saying so, made their decision. '.

It is likely the Amazon connection was likely in the works long before Palm recieved the ruling by USB-IF, which I believe was only about two weeks ago.
It goes without saying and I'm sure you already know it, but it's so important that it needs to be said (again):

Get something out there, sooner rather than later.

Many of us have been there. We want to make something so good that we just want to add "one more thing" before we release. Next thing you know, it's a year later and we wonder where the time went. I imagine you guys are just too saavy to let that happen. Good luck!
CSS Table Gallery - data tables with freely downloadable templates.
Top Tips for Apprentices - Finding a Good Mentor is Key
Mobile Java Matters 2009 - Part I
Yahoo opens new home page to external developers
CSS3 transitions and animation: Presentation or behavior?
Reconstructing the structure of the world-wide music scene with Last.fm
A new phishing attack on SiteKey
I thought they weren't doing this expansion until tomorrow.
Not trying to be funny, but I am kind of surprised they didn't just buy a few and make copies of them.
Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update
This reminds me of an article I read awhile ago (in wired?) that said something to the effect that China could very well leap-frog petroleum and go straight to a 'green' transportation model. Seems dictators don't have to wage petty battles over who-gets-what-when-where-why-and-how.

Given the number of dedicated, high speed rail lines in the U.S. (uhm, 0? as far as I know...), it looks like China could beat us.

Note: Not advocating communism or anything here, it just makes me angry that rail transit is so crappy in this country. It's a great way to travel, at least in Europe.
Y_serial: warehouse Python objects with SQLite
Looks like I was right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850654