skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One solution I've used for storing small templates in HTML: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/

<script type="text/html" id="user_tmpl">
<% for ( var i = 0; i < users.length; i++ ) { %>
<li><a href="<%=users[i].url%>"><%=users[i].name%></a></li>
<% } %>
</script>

Quick tip: Embedding scripts in your page that have a unknown content-type (such is the case here - the browser doesn't know how to execute a text/html script) are simply ignored by the browser - and by search engines and screenreaders.

This is quick and dirty, but much more elegant than writing HTML in JS.
Lol, how easy is this?
I've used one of the HP branded models and my results were not so good. The maximum resolution is 1680x1050 which is too low for some 23" and most 24" displays. The high CPU usage it demanded was too much for a 1.8Ghz MacBook Air Rev C to handle without significant lagging and beach balling. The performance was acceptable on a MBP CD2 2Ghz for the most part but spikes in CPU usage (Vmware for example) would cause some wonky things to occur on the USB display. It also introduced some sleep/wake problems which may have since been resolved with a driver update. I think USB2 is too much of a bottleneck for this type of device to offer a seamless solution. Unless you need a third display on an iMac, Mini or MacBook you're better off buying $60 worth of spare adapters IMO.
Pure was already competing with other devices. digital cameras, cell phones, low end camcorders. I don't think it's going to kill them, though it will be interesting to see what the next refresh of the product line looks like for them.
There are a fair number of classic studies on the placebo effect, but nothing recent that I'm aware of. For example:

- Apparently the placebo effect has become more pronounced over time: an analysis of the placebo arms of various clinical trials showed that more recent ones tend to be more reliable

- Similarly, placebos are more potent in trials of new drugs, than in trials re-assessing the effects of older drugs

- The all-time classic is the study that shows that the placebo effect works even if the patient knows that the pill has no medicine in it.
List of Mathematical Blogs & Wikis
I like to use macros (in C) to spit out the structure size and offsets of each structure member over a serial port, in a format I can then cut-n-paste back into the source. This output consists of a bunch of (compile-time, when possible) assertions so that any changes to a structure break the build. These assertions go on both the embedded side and the PC server side, so any weird packing issues show up at compile time.
so it's your fault...
For people without an invite (me included) I found this. I hope it helps chances:

http://lifehacker.com/5377289/win-a-google-wave-invite-with-...
Niche Site Builders
Last July Paul Graham put this on his list of <a href="http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html">ideas he'd like to fund</a>:

"29. Easy site builders for specific markets. Weebly is a good, general-purpose site builder. But there are a lot of markets that could use more specialized tools. What's the best way to make a web site if you're a real estate agent, or a restaurant, or a lawyer? There still don't seem to be canonical answers.

Obviously the way to build this is to write a flexible site builder, then write layers on top to produce different variants. Hint: The key to making a site builder for end-users is to make software that lets people with no design ability produce things that look good or at least professional."

So I've been kicking this around for a while and wonder what the community's thoughts are. What are the key features for an site that would allow you to come in an build website for your niche (donut shops, tow trucks, dentists)?
Smashing Magazine does this thing that really irks me, where they pick a bunch of good examples and then one or two very mediocre ones. It leaves me wondering if I'm insane or if Smashing really is making an effort there.
My former roommate and good friend Joe is trying to start a brew pub near Madison, WI. His blog chronicling the process and related topics:

http://republicbrewpub.blogspot.com/
text-decoration:underline clears things up pretty well
<?php header('Content-type: text/css'); ?>

Knock yourself out!
Yeah, I was borrowing from the old expression "work smarter, not harder".

Smarter in this context means bringing our intelligence to bear on the issue of workflow and how we go about doing our work. I wasn't meaning to imply that it means we need to literally become smarter.
Ask HN: Using Kindle DX to read large pdf text books
Hi

I am interested in reading large pdf documents on the Kindle DX. For example http://www.math.umass.edu/~lavine/Book/book.pdf is 45 MB.
Has any one had success transferring such large pdf documents to the Kindle DX?
Adding now :)
Yes, basically. "Real dollars" are dollars adjusted for inflation.

I think it's a little more precise than just saying "inflation-adjusted dollars" because when people hear that, they automatically assume "adjusted using CPI," which is only one way to try and correct for inflation. It's a reasonably well-accepted way, but there are others. (E.g.: labor-hours are popular in some circles.)

Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_versus_nominal_value_%28ec...
Better one.

Guy I knew - awesomely good - hex edited a DOS boot sector on a in house machine to use FUCK.SYS instead of whatever.sys it normally is (I forget). He renamed that file to fuck.sys, rebooted and the machine ran. Cool!

We laughed and reinstalled DOS and two days later the boss come charging in yelling 'I have a client on the phone who says his new machine can't find FUCK.SYS!'

The awesome guy goes 'uh oh'. I laughed.
I spent most of the '70s programming in 18-bit assembler [pdp-15 clones] - where should that go?
These guys are in my town and do an excellent job of marketing themselves. I get the impression that the business is run very well. They have a really good internet presence - might be worth contacting them and picking the owners brain a bit seeing as your market is similar (upper midwest) but distanced enough to not be a huge direct competitor.

http://www.newhollandbrew.com/
I don't necessarily disagree, but the point was about salespeople - who ARE motivated by financial incentives and SHOULD be motivated by financial incentives.

You can criticize my parenting for sure - but I claim to be an expert sales guy - not an expert parent!

In this talk, Dan says that when you put certain incentives on - you narrow the focus of thinking. EXACTLY!! You WANT to focus the salespersons thinking and have them focused on MONEY. Both for themselves and the company.

Salespeople are not like the rest of you. If you want to motivate a salesteam, you need to re-do all of these tests with only salespeople.

If I was presented with the candle problem, I'd sell the candle and use the money to buy a dripless candle!

Sales people are NOT NORMAL!! We operate on a different frequency. Sometimes 100% of what we do is based on financial rewards. True - may not work for most people - and maybe I'm screwing up my son (although I think he is a future salesguy), but I stand by my position that the right financial rewards drive sales.
I tend to disagree with this sentiment. I believe that one has master a language when they know every construct of a language. e.g. Messaging, Delegates, Currying, Pointer, Anonymous functions, OO, Public / Private, Mix-in / Interface, ad nasium). Knowing the libraries is irrelevant to the fact of knowing the language and the deep recesses of dark magic you can call upon if needed.

Libraries are nothing more than reading an API to get needed functionality without writing it yourself (not disparaging them, that is the point of reuse). That being said you should have picked up some basic library knowledge on your way to fully comprehending a language.

Lets take Java for example, I know guys that know every API of the JDK, JEE, Commons, et. al. They can glue together any enterprise app that you throw at them with JDBC, Struts JPA, and on and on) but they are by no means masters of Java.

As well when I did AI work for the simulation industry, I knew guys that did not know a lick of the libraries (hyperbole) but understood anonymous classes, listeners, command chains, threading and could work magic with their code. When I first moved to doing enterprise apps. I wrote my code as I did when I was doing AI and I was asked to stop writing it that manner because it was unreadable by the other developers. They had literally never seen an inline declared anonymous class used as method reference to emulate a delegate or function pointer.

Anyway long story short, one group clearly new the breadth of the libraries more thoroughly. But the other group could solve problems more efficiently. It depends where you place the concept of mastering a language. Clearly my opinion is that it is the latter.
Why Windows 7 Won't Save Microsoft
KDE makes their stuff available for OS X. One day I tried Amarok, partly because a Linuxing friend used it and recommended it, mainly because the Mike Oldfield song of the same name is my favorite song of all time. It installed a bunch of crap on my computer, added a folder directly to my root user, took a minute to launch, displayed a huge logo while it was launching, presented me with the ugliest interface I've ever faced on this operating system, took hours to find my music, then crashed when I tried to play a song.

Apple is of the opinion that its programs have to be unique and special. After my experience with KDE-on-Mac, I'm going to agree and say that if Linux things ran instantly on the Mac, the quality of experience for anybody who made an effort to run them would drop sharply.

I'm fine with the App system on the Mac. It's ultrasimple. Package management is a teeny bit simpler, but it's not enough for me to bother over.
I think there is a startup opportunity for apps that will send a text message at the press of a single button. For example, one that sends an ETA message when you press a button. (Use historical data and location services to dymanically compose an accurate message.)
An Alien God (Eliezer Yudkowsky, about Evolution)
Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?
http://wizbang.sourceforge.net

I've been building an app that started as a college project. Its purpose is to let people build programs visually and learn programming without worrying about missing a semi-colon.

The program supports loops, conditional branches, number operations (add, subtract, etc.), input and output. The programs can be run immediately from inside WizBang.

BUT, the #1 feature is that after a program is built and the user has verified that it behaves how they want, they can click one button and compile their program down to working and valid code in C++, Python, and Java.

This allows the user to learn programming in the opposite way that is usually taught in universities. In WizBang, the user learns programming behavior before language syntax. Which, I hope, will allow more students to get excited about programming, instead of being scared away by compiler errors.

Any feedback is appreciated!
Information Overload Makes You Dumb
SpiderOak.com code includes plenty of client-side software. It's a zero-knowledge online storage/share/sync system, founded in '06.
Since you mention COBOL records were variable-length I'd guess that they probably contained ODOs (Occurs-Depending-On, variable length arrays for those of you who aren't COBOL literate). In order for a group or record MOVE to work properly you had to move the subordinate ODO values first, otherwise the runtime system would miscalculate the target record length, possibly truncating the MOVE.

This also meant you couldn't use READ INTO for variable length records (which is equivalent to a READ followed by a MOVE) without taking some care.

As you say: "newbies shake their heads..."
GDB over IRC
Courier New is rounded.
GitHub's Unicorn Setup
Ugh...

That is tremendously bloody, definitely not to my taste. But it definitely dramatically shows why you shouldn't text while driving.
But as far as I can tell, the main thing they're good at is being a one-stop shop...
Oklahoma Abortion Law and Privacy: Bloggers get it Wrong
I'm fine with the App system on the Mac. It's ultrasimple. Package management is a teeny bit simpler, but it's not enough for me to bother over.

I'm not sure it's actually simpler; as a software author, my experience has been:

If I want to release something for the Mac, I post a dmg containing a dragable application; and even the most non-technical user can download and install it immediately. Sparkle provides automatic updates via my website; users gets the latest versions whenever they want them, I don't have to do anything complicated.

If I want to release something for the UNIXes, I provide a set of autoconf scripts and a make-based build system (or one of the recent alternatives, or a Python egg, or a Ruby gem), hope that the package management systems pick it up during their next release cycle, wind up in an argument with Debian over OpenSSL+GPL licensing compatibility, and see my software get shipped with half the featured turned off and a ridiculous number of local hacks applied, including all-too-regularly replacement of a working library dependency with something that doesn't work (but Debian likes it more).

The average end-user doesn't see my updates for months or years, the software is missing features and locally modified, and I have to wonder: Why couldn't I just give them something that they could drag to their applications folder?
I am very happy to see this, I've wanted it for years now! I can only imagine that shared hosting servers wont like it.
You must not have been programming for long.
IronRuby Nears its 1.0 Release
This is awesome. I've been using SBJSON but probably will be switching over. Thanks!
It happens. You can even serve legal notice "by publication". So if you can't track someone down and the judge approves it, it's perfectly legal to serve notice by posting an ad in the local newspaper (which of course the recipient will never see).

If this weren't the case, screening your mail judiciously would be the ultimate legal defense against all civil litigation.
Thanks.

Maybe i should say: "The easiest way to create a shareable list of real world stuff"
Fun little time waster. I like the concept and implementation (although it's a bit easy as others have said). My only suggestion is to provide a login method besides Twitter. OpenID would be great.
The child shouldn't be punished for bad performance on the football field. Physically he may not be as strong or as qualified to play in sports. It would be quite unfair for the parent to punish the child for not doing well in sports.

The only way in which a punishment (loss of allowance) system could work is if the child lost video game privileges for example for not doing homework and not putting enough effort into their work.

But punishing the child for not performing well in situations in which their performance is beyond their control would just be cruel.
Maybe something that can use GPS in your car combined with traffic data to let the folks at home know when you are expected to arrive.
Two things that would improve this tremendously: 1) More difficult questions sooner and 2) Force you to start over after N wrong answers so the score matters
Good business lesson? Maybe.

Good parenting lesson? Hell no.
How a 1-Engineer Rails Site Scaled to 10 Million Requests Per Day
Love the title: Affine Mess

Is there any higher form of humor than the math pun? I think not.
YAJL is a streaming parser (with an included Document style parser) which means you can use it streaming in situations where memory constraints are tight or as a general load everything into memory parser, very handy. I'm not aware of any other Obj-C friendly streaming JSON parsers.
I worked on a piece of arcade equipment (manufacturer and model shall remain nameless) that used a bunch of solenoids to control the works under glass.

A little race condition in the code allowed one of the smaller solenoids to stay in a duty-cycled state, effectively turning the coil into a small space heater. Given the right play conditions and length of play, the coil could catch fire, and a couple of times it did. Lots of wood and plastic under glass made for a fun little display.

I heard one story about a unit in Paris being dragged out of a cafe and into the street, then put out with axes and buckets of water. Wish I had been there to see that.
Yes, "with":

- adds an extra look-up when resolving scope

- creates code that sometimes isn't immediately obvious

But with this technique you basically get to forget you're writing code in a namespace. You can var myFunc; all you want without polluting the global. And you can put the library in a separate file and reference its exposed methods as if they were written in the body of your application.
Defensive Programming (What to do if your app fails)
I honestly don't get why this is so heavily down voted. I want my "original hacker's news" back. What's next in the /. -> k5 -> hn chain?
While I was working at Lucent, they had an builtin ftp client which was used to transfer images to the router from a server.

Right after I checked in my code (a completely unrelated feature), this ftp facility broke such that you couldnt ftp an image to any router on any platform. So I was assigned this bug which basically stalled the release on every platform that we supported. (The CTO himself called me.)
Now you have to realise this BigCo supplies every cell phone carrier in the nation - Sprint, Verizon etc.

What I found was that the ftp system had a bug such that if the image being ftp-ed was an exact multiple of 8k (or something like that) then it would fail. My checkin made the image file an exact multiple of 8K. (Story of my life!)

I found the bug, emailed the CTO and he assigned someone from the core team to fix it. That guy calls me up and in the end I fixed it myself using vi and kibitz.
My company started as a native app company, but we are slowly migrating a legacy technology to the web.
haha... yes indeed
> And I bet it does a hell lot, or otherwise they wouldn't been so keen to go to jail.

No offense, but sometimes people are willing to stand up and fight for what they believe in. Just because what they believe in is something that you disagree with doesn't make them any less willing to possibly sacrifice themselves for their cause.

I don't believe that the Middle East should be ruled over by Muslim 'overlords' that use the religion as a form of governance, but that doesn't mean that there are no suicide bombers out there willing to further that cause.
I like this approach (especially the idea that users can see the generated code and start to understand how they might write it themselves). I think you'll learn more by trying it out on non-programmers or beginning programmers and watching how they use it. Most of us here on HN probably can't evaluate it from the right point of view.

You might want to compare http://scratch.mit.edu/ for some UI inspiration.
Decorate Your 2009 Halloween Stickers
Yes. Absolutely. For everything from education to autobuilding software tests.
So all of that toolbars+toolchests+doorknobs stuff was nothing more than the old "I don't like the menus at the top, and I get confused when applications don't quit when I close the last open window" trope? Blimey.

Menubar-at-top vs in-window is a well-rehearsed religious bit, and I'm sure everyone else here knows the score. I don't think we'll get anywhere productive hashing it out further. Enough to say that it has advantages I think you overlook (including Fitt's Law), and the Gods of Usability are, like many Gods, on nobody's side but their own. I'm sorry Apple offended you.

(Oh: You haven't been making the mistake since 1984, btw: MultiFinder didn't come out until 1998, and wasn't default until System 7, so there weren't any other open apps. And AmigaOS uses the same menu-at-top system, for apps that run inside Workbench).
I understand the problem but I've been burnt one time before by a cofounder so I'm a little gun-shy there.

I'm primarily interested in creating a company that relates to outdoor sports and the environment and travel. I also envision NOT sitting in front of a computer all the time and creating a company thats very Patagonia-like w.r.t employing people.
AP, News Corp bosses tell search engines to pay up
By selling their services to others. Musicians can sell live performances. Authors can ghost write, edit, etc. This isn't a big leap of imagination.
Really liked it! However, it was too easy, even on level 19 (where I stopped playing). New typefaces should perhaps be released every level, and only give sans/sans or serif/serif alternative answers to each question.
It's true, my views are not mainstream, but I think even mainstream observers would disagree with you here. In the last 50 years China has seen the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the transition to a corporatist economy in the Deng era.

What was the last change in the US approaching this magnitude? Possibly the New Deal, but even that is quite a stretch. It does not really compare to going from the deadly Great Leap Forward (20-43 million dead, 53% poverty rate under Mao) to the current corporatism (around 6% poverty rate) in less than half a century.

That being said, I'm not sure if or why you're using flexibility in governance as a metric for good government. The government having the ability to change policies quickly is not necessarily a good thing all the time. It seems to me the actual policies themselves matter more.
All that "you can't skip these previews" crap at the beginning of DVDs were be there regardless of pirates. It's all about companies treating customers as an inexhaustible resource to mine as they see fit.
I've just started to work on a "Face Recognition" startup ...
Scratch is a neat system. But I found it to be slower than just typing code. I know that's not the point, but my thinking is that doing something graphically with lego blocks should be faster than typing out all the characters one at a time.

I've worked a bit with graphical dataflow systems (like LabView) that can actually realize a much quicker time to operation than hashing out equivalent code by hand.
The Finest Example of Social Media Marketing I've Seen
Ask HN: Have any of you heard about Blastoff?
There's A LOT of buzz I'm hearing from multiple social circles and casual cafe chat about this service. I've done some research on it, and am not quite sure what they're going for. They seem a bit scammy, as it's based on cash back and referrals, but the grassroots marketing efforts these guys have done seems pretty remarkable. I have tens of friends a day signing up and waiting for invites - friends who otherwise wouldn't care about online services, and receiving invites, other than Facebook - and yet I have not seen one commercial/advert/discussion both online and on tv.

Coincidentally, I just received two Facebook notifications of friends spreading their referral links.
> ... and on the other freetards that don't provide a realistic revenue model for artists.

Gee, I didn't know this "intellectual property" war has gone this far! Is it now a crime not to provide a realistic revenue model for artists?

Just in case it's actually true (I haven't been following the news recently) I am hereby providing a realistic revenue model for artists: get a job.

No, really. I don't believe that being an artist (or an author in general) entitles you to anything. Copyright is a privilege, not a god-given right. Its original purpose was to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", a social contract designed to provide fair compensation for contributing to the public pool of ideas.

Then the suits came and fucked this up with their concept of intellectual "property" and perpetual copyright term extensions. Copyright doesn't serve its original purpose anymore, we should just drop it. If you don't like it, don't publish. It had been this way for most of human history and it worked fine.