skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My general point was that although cars are safer than before, we still need to look at the system they are a part of which affects safety. I don't want people to make the conclusion that it's safer driving now than before - that may or may not be the case.
Or don't care and don't want to build in a special case.
Wow... do we have such an epically failed understanding of economics that "behavior incented by money increases" merits a headline? Seriously?

Now whether they're incenting the right things (test scores) is debatable, but why is this newsworthy?
I think it depends on your intent. Being a dick is a clever strategy if you want attention. Being a dick by calling someone very popular (or visible) stupid gets you attention. Instead of people ignoring the dick, they pile on and then criticize him -- which is giving him attention. Then, people who find some reason to agree with him pile on and defend him. Bamb, the dick has now usurped some of the targets authority.

(P.S. I am not defending this strategy. I find it annoying -- but entertaining in a checkout line gossip rag type way.)
New concept art, the game framework programming has started and a nod to Reddit
Syntactically yes. To make it fast the compiler recognizes it as a special case. I think that there is no special case for this in Self: the self compiler can optimize this away (even if you write your own True and False). But maybe I didn't remember that correctly.
Ask HN: Using R
I think of myself as a burgeoning statistician first and a programmer a distance second. That might just be due to my first interests, and obviously data mining, data analysis and machine learning are truly both rather than one or the other.

In the stats community, R is widely used and I wanted to know if there were any R users on HN? If so, what exciting things are you doing or have you seen with the language?
Have there been any invites sent out from HN so far - I've yet to see any replies indicating they have
If there's one thing I love, it's the + mark :)
The tone is hilarious. Love the build up.
Are there any publicly viewable videos from companies that made it into yc? I want to see what constitutes a good video.
Imagine you built a wooden box just big enough to hold an egg. Drop it on the floor from 5-6 feet; the box will likely be fine, but the egg won't.
HN's interface is not so bad... the only thing I'd like are larger/padded "# comments" links, since that's typically the first thing I look at anyway.
Another drawback of this approach is that the text will looked horrible on CRTs. CRTs don't have the same pixel geometry as LCDs.
Sounds like what I was looking for. Looks good.

The interface is too bright IMO (just checked the screenshots).
RoR workshops for men who've taken time away from their careers to raise children. Also not a bad idea.
NoSQL solves many of the problems that SQL has (with tradoffs, of course). The big ones:

Performance: Key value stores are fast. You lose features like queries by anything other than index and/or ACID guarantees. (Tokyo Cabinet or Redis).

Data structures: storing non-flat data (trees, graphs) in a SQL database == FAIL. Building a DB around a non-flat data structure lets you avoid doing O(N) queries to traverse a structure. (See Neo4j for graphs or CouchDB/Mongo for trees).
Not that I know of, but you could ask Scott and maybe they'd post theirs. (Actually it's still up, so all he'd have to do is make the page public.)
morton.thomas@googlemail.com

(on the off chance :))
Facebook Just Made It Super Easy To Put Connect On Your Site
Don't put a fixed price, allow users to pay what the site's worth to them.

You can go freemium route. Providing SMS and/or e-mail based reminder service to your paying customers only springs to mind.
Audio slideshow: Stephen Hawking
When I first visited Hacker News, I was a little offput by the design, but quickly embraced it after discovering the quality of content. I now see this as an advantage, as it can turn away undesirable users that would not add quality to our conversations. I can't guess really whether this effect is true, but anything that could keep this from turning into reddit or digg would be great.
I was with him until he said "I could care less".

Couldn't damnit, could not. This irks me to no end.

</grammar nazi>
I haven't installed it, but from looking at the docs, I think there are couple major differences.

One is that we provide a UI with several views that let's you slice and dice your way into finding the content you are looking for. For instance, you can view your history visually in thumbnail view, by a variety of calendar views, or by the category of your content.

Second, we look at the content (and possibly your actions) to determine what the content of the page is and what you've done, and put it into categories. All the videos you've seen or searches you've done, etc, will be categorized so you can quickly find by the type of content for which you are looking.

Third, we include an open greasemonkey style api so that this can be extended (the only one we have right now is a "Hacker News" plugin that records every article you click on from hacker news). For instance, we plan on adding plugins that don't fit for the general public. Conceivably, you could add a blogging plugin that might record all the comments you add to a blog, or a developer plugin that records all the api calls you look up on various sites whitelisted sites so that you can quickly get back to that content.
I don't know for sure if it works, but is definitely deliberate.
Why that would be ironic?
I tend to liken RAM to a table, programs/data to books, and the hard drive to a bookshelf.

You can't read stuff on a bookshelf; you have to take it out and put it on the table to open it. (Sure, you can read a book on a couch, but this is the computer we're talking about - it has certain rules.)

You can take out as many books from the bookshelf as you like, as long as they fit on the open table.

If you run out of table space, you need to make more space on the table, and the only way to do that is to put books back on the shelf.

If you're trying to open too many books at once with too little table space, the only thing you can do is constantly go back and forth between the bookshelf and the table, open the book, find your place, etc., read a word, take it back, open the previous book, write it down, etc., and it's going to take you way longer to do the same work.
Again, crazy.

The only thing it does is keep postcode methods of geo-location unavailable to the UK public. Canada, Australia, the US and most of Europe are already moving forward here because they don't have this restriction... the UK loses out.
These have nothing to do with the concept, just the current state of the tools. There is no reason that a non-relational DB without a declarative query language can't have good support for data dumps, ad hoc queries and ad hoc "data fixing".
23 comments and over half are whining about the color. This is why I just put my code in Github and let people discover it themselves... that way I don't get a bunch of unsolicited "help".
Trust me. We still have the same issues.
I'm not sure if I understand the pricing explanation...

1) Cloud computing minus the sky-high prices

2) just $99 plus AWS charges

So it's cloud computing plus the sky-high prices?

Typo?
Gathering Signs of Privacy Winds
GGplot2, by H Wickham

http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

and the bay Area user's group

http://www.meetup.com/R-Users/calendar/10446894/
The discussion on this post is more interesting than the content. The constitution guarantees a right to privacy, but mostly from the government.

Privacy advocates talk about how behavioral ad networks are violating our privacy, and I've yet to hear a solid argument as to how they have been abused thus far to the consumer's detriment. I'm interested in any and all thoughts because I am, in general, a privacy advocate... I just don't see the impending doom that others seen in BANs
I asked for help. I'm fine with it. The code is on github

http://github.com/paddymul/rxvt-js

http://github.com/paddymul/TerminalcastRecord
I've always thought that could be a clever turn of phrase, like, "Well, I could care less, but that would actually require effort." Like, utter and complete apathy, even unto apathy for the apathy.
I commend you, good sir, and assert that you are no grammar nazi. A nazi is crude, unreasonable and thoughtless. You are none of these things. You have merely demanded a minimum amount of effort from the people around you, an infinitesimal moment spent in quiet reflection that could perhaps result in a magical epiphany resembling, "Wait a minute, if I could care less, that means I am caring more than the minimum! That is not what I am trying to express! Alack, I must duly backspace."

Edit: And to whoever downvoted this man, I officially call you a knave.
Http://searchyc.com/ down?
Ironically, I was checking into HN to find "Down for me" and I wanted to use SearchYC, but it appears to be down for me! And has been for a while.

So I turned to Google, found http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/searchyc.com
and it's not just me.

Any news?
It's from thoughtbot, makers of Shoulda, Factory_girl, Paperclip, and others.
> Unfortunately, the plugins aren't consistent.

You correct in this respect, but what I found possible was for me to fork some of the plugins. With Ext, I could never dream of doing that in any reasonable time-frame. The last time I had a look at Ext I could not understand if it was possible to introduce some sort of progressive enhancement. Has this changed?

Long term the jQuery UI will provide the full set of these widgets, especially since some big names are supporting the organization now. John was a brilliant marketer as he understood what developer wanted. $ not YAHOO.something.something. $().css({}) not Something.Something.getCSS().

IMHO if you look at the evolution of computer languages, Coders always went for the shorthand versions, C won over Pascal as it did away with Begin .. End. This can be applied to all the libaries. It is actually common practice for Coders working with verbose languages such as PHP, to have their own stash of util functions with shorter names. Know Thy Market!
153 comments and counting. I don't know who will find my comment in the mix of all this, but here's hoping:

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01pgWlnMQ_EuvMDzAzg5Nugw==...
Some people still think shutting off the monitor means shutting off the computer

Heh. I had this problem with my mom who could never understand that she could record on her VCR even if the TV was off. Or tuned to another channel.
An Artificial Heart That Doesn't Beat
5 Big Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make
For more useful tips and insight check out Scott Edward Walker's blog: http://walkercorporatelaw.com/blog.
Actually, the question of "What incentives motivate teachers to teach well?" is extremely debatable, and the real question underlying your "behavior incented by money increases" comment.

At the moment, it's effectively impossible to fire teachers after two or three years, no matter how poorly they do: see, for example, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_... .
We use SugarCRM: (PHP/MySQL or hosted) http://www.sugarcrm.com/ there's an open source version : http://www.sugarforge.org/
I think you got it: http://twitter.com/zedshaw/statuses/4502578820
Here is the detailed article
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17523/
It could be Zed, but the funny thing is in that case, Zed got 100% test coverage for Lamson done about a month ago.

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-08-22.html
I specifically called it slander which means I don't think it's true. That's what slander is.
Richard M. Stallman: Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#
From wikipedia:
In science, researchers commonly report the standard deviation of experimental data, and only effects that fall far outside the range of standard deviation are considered statistically significant—normal random error or variation in the measurements is in this way distinguished from causal variation.

Thus the results are not statistically significant aka with in normal random error etc. So when did 0.3 of not significant become significant.
The reason the Mac mouse has only one button... so that users never need to think about which one to click.
Further Reflections on the CodePlex Foundation: The Glass Half Full
A couple weeks ago I posted a long Q&A on Microsoft's new CodePlex Foundation, which someone linked to here. I've now written a second part to that analysis, this time focusing on whether such an organization, if it really was useful, could be useful, and if so, for what purpose.
I simply have to point out how awesome it is to be on a site where the two comments beginning with "Excellent list" and "Worthless list" are both equally upvoted to the top of the thread list. Thank you, HN, for letting me hold on to a sliver of faith in humanity.
in my google reader:

http://blog.revolution-computing.com/

http://learnr.wordpress.com/

http://www.decisionstats.com/

http://anyall.org/blog/

--------------------------

http://ask.metafilter.com/116762/Rrrrrgh

http://alittleknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/r-for-pedes...

and some portals:

http://planetr.stderr.org/

http://info.smu.edu.sg/rsite/
sWeet, it's like HN without the pesky users...

sorry, it's not a terrible idea in another context, but HN is its users.

decent plug for cubbyscott though.
The most memorable for me was the user who called everything a "macro". Called once when his mouse stopped working and said his computer had "lost its mouse macros".
> Paul later told me that the big difference was that he recognized me from Hacker News and that I said smart things there. So if that was the critical difference, the question is, “Why was I saying smart things?”

Another question might be, "How would you have faired had you been a mere lurker on HN?"
He has more than you think. To give one example, Apple could include the FSF in the suit meaning whatever assets the FSF has could be put into jeapordy. I'm not saying that's right or fair and I'm not saying they'd even win but they could inflict some damage (legal fees alone would be an issue)

When someone's using the law as a weapon they're trying to take away what the other person values. Just because someone doesn't value money doesn't mean the law can't take away other things.
Excellent post. As someone who is going to apply to YC this coming winter, this article contains some extremely valuable information.

What I get from it mostly though, is that getting accepted is less about the application, and more about getting out there and getting things done.

Essentially, I can see a number of common points between both wheels' post and pg's comment:

1. It's a great idea to have something started. Once you have something started, pitching your idea and refining your pitch will surely help you out when explaining what problem you're trying to solve.

2. Contributing to HN often will help build your reputation. Nothing can help grow your reputation online like writing does. I've been told time and time again that I am an excellent writer, and that people respect me for it. If you can write well, contribute to HN.

3. Sharing your product with other people on HN is a great way to get feedback. The more feedback you receive, the greater ability you have to improve your product and eventually succeed.

4. The new(er) feature that allows you to post a video of you and your co-founders may actually be invaluable to getting accepted into the program. I would agree with this in that it's hard to judge a person's qualities from their writing alone. A video will give you a deeper look at their personality, and maybe a glimpse of whether or not they could handle a program such as YC.

With point four in mind, I was wondering if anyone has any advice on a little problem I am having. The problem is derived from the fact that my single co-founder is currently in NYC for the next few months. What would be the best way to create a video for our application, if we are both in different countries?

Thanks,

jlgosse
Site is down. No Google cache yet either...
Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?
The problem with OS X font rendering imho is that it produces heavier result than anything else.

I made comparison picture, and noticed that Adobe Reader renders text bit taller than others, but on the other hand it has imho best antialiasing. http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/5549/fontrendering.png

(Samples are from Windows/Wordpad, Adobe Acrobat(using pdf printed from Wordpad), Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop (sharp), in that order.)
There is a huge and growing R community. I am using randomForest (originally in Fortran) package as a classifier for my dataset.
> you can store the HTML, JS and the data all in CouchDB

I think you're talking of CouchApp, which allows you to create apps like that on top of CouchDB. Of course, if that was the maximum of what one was trying to do, one could get similar functionality from an RDBMS, some simple routing rules, and a CGI script that served content straight from the DB.

I guess my point is that there's not really anything intrinsic to CouchDB that makes this possible: it's a pretty short and inviting conceptual leap from "this DB does everything through an HTTP interface" to "I can run my entire application from this DB". My worry (and I'm not accusing the parent of this) is that that misses out on all of the other things that CouchDB offers (especially the ability to merge DBs that have been disconnected for long periods, which often gets lost behind the HTTP interface and MapReduce hand-waving).
Definition of Success
You mentioned "Data is stored on your local computer so your history remains private" what about giving the possibility to upload to the web, then I can get my browser history whenever I am. Maybe a possibility to merge browser histories would be cool also ;)

But even with this, it stills very COOL!.

Congrats
Hey wheels, would you mind posting up your first YC application? I ask because I'd love to get something to contrast against dhouston's (Dropbox) amazing application. I think it would be really interesting if you had as good of an application and got rejected. This could be a good dose of reality for people looking to apply (myself included).
if you can spare one =')

csytan@gmail.com
Thanks. I'd love an invite

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01UZXDnReVvleGoyUDiFTUrA==...
dodeja (at) gmail

Thanks!
"I could care less" is sarcasm that has fossilized into idiom. Notice how it has a different intonation than you would expect from a simple declarative statement.
Super!
http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01rVkbSQD4X6QlqniANE5rnw==...
Thanks in advance.
If anyone has one I'd absolutely love an invite. :)

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01i9oN8I2cp061kXPoDZA4Ug==...
If you have to pick only one, I think #15 should be it.
I can relate partially to this. To learn a language fully you need to work on a fairly good size project and one morning you will have 'flow'. It is similar to learning a human language. You need to get to the point where you 'think' in the language and you stop flipping through a fat reference book or jumping from website to website for information.

However, I go a bit different:

(01) I try to go over all the basics and repeat simple exercises from other language books. I do the for loops arrays operators etc ... etc. I spend a lot of time here in order to remember the syntax. I hate syntax mistakes so the earlier I get proficient the better.

(02) Objects and functions break in easily

(03) The web stuff and libraries

(04) Project here. Get your last epiphany and repeat it in Lisp!

I am going through Clojure at the moment and I had to introduce an additional step to the above, an UNLEARN stage, to change my thinking to functional! Current 'epiphany project', type in Clojure code in a textbox, parse with javascript and print the results. I am at 'Hello World' :).
tag parse error
Would love an invite as well.

johng at forum foundry . com
"but this is no different than any other OS that is upgradable"

Except for the fact that in free and open-source you can examine the code that conducts the update.

For instance, my iPod-to-TV cable stopped working when I update my iPod touch (http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/blog_en/i-really-want-to-lik...). Could I examine the update, I could rather easily change the part that broke perfectly functional hardware and reverse the change in functionality Apple imposed upon me.
For the longest time I was one of them, in spite of being probably one of the very early adopters for 'ajax' (before it even had a name and you had to jump through hoops to get data back to your wannabe page modifying script).

I sort of lost track of how fast the developments where going and then somewhere I ran into this apple II emulator in js. It completely floored me that that was possible.
The problems mentioned are huge in the over-30, non-tech crowd. I worked IT in college, and the skills of professors and admins older than 35 were much worse than the average English major in a computer lab.

They viewed the machine as a Magic Box that let them type documents and browse the web and sometimes crashed if they angered it. Some needed help getting CDs out of the tray. Some didn't know that "check if it is plugged in" is a troubleshooting step. Some were very superstitious about crashes ("don't move the monitor!" was my favorite).

If you don't see anyone struggling with these concepts, well, I haven't since I got a programming job 3 years ago. They didn't stop having problems, I just don't see the problems anymore. Always watch out for selection bias: the set of "people you know" isn't representative of the population at large
1 invite please http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01S_Yay-Hd_g4MyhtjwlHC4g==...
As a high school student, I find it somewhat discouraging that Weebly's the only way to make a website for National History Day - what about people that know HTML and CSS inside out and would prefer coding it by hand to creating a site with Weebly?
it should actually be changed to "NoRDBMS". SQL-ish languages are still used to access data in a non-rdbms environment (re. pig and the like).
Indeed--parts of speech up to entire subjects or objects may be omitted where they're understood from context. Here, it's obvious that the full, time-worn phrase is "I could try to care less, but I might strain something."
I am just a bit more cynical. What is personal success?

I will consider myself successful with the knowledge that if I die to-morrow, there will be some people crying at my funeral and these will not be my creditors.
Artist Who Made $30k On Webcasts Is Not Afraid To Take Your Money
Why good writers are bad conversationalists
Beware the temptation to post on HN in order to look smart for your YC application. Better to spend time working on your company and save your HN comments for when you actually have something to say.
Clear (US Airport fast lane) may be coming back
Copy of article text: http://dpaste.com/hold/100477/
ed@ my hn username .net

Thanks.
I think see your point in the first sentence, in that money alone (once you've achieved a basic livelihood) is a questionable motivator of job quality. The article, however, is not necessarily talking about "teaching well," it was fundamentally about improving test scores.

I was mostly taking issue with the headline's (and article's) apparent surprise that offering money for higher X caused X to increase. Not sure why an experiment was needed to establish this.

Also, your rubber room article is horrifying, but I don't really see the relevance... except that the reward mechanism has been completely divorced from performance of any kind.
I'd love to see their video too.
My conversion had to wait till Ben Firshman's JSNES.
Yeah, I don't really get the "for the web" in the title.

I need pristine font rendering on my webserver
Umm someone needs to explain that you're supposed to let the viral video spread where it will, not send take down notices when it does start to spread.