skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mozilla is fundamentally opposed to decency on ideological grounds.

They really should just do a generalized version of what Safari does -- call out to Quicktime / DirectShow / GStreamer, but they'll never do that, because it would invalidate their efforts to shove OGG down people's throats.

Barring that, they should do what Chrome does -- link in a normal copy of ffmpeg that's built without most of the codecs by default.

Instead, they link directly with liboggplay. You'd have to significantly fork Gecko in order to support anything but Vorbis and Theora in OGG containers. It reminds me of the way Stallman designed GCC's internal representations to be impossible to interface with externally.

If you're going to wank about respecting patents and copyright licenses, let them be enforced by the legal system -- don't do it by writing obnoxious code.
retweets are one way to quantify relevance. "real people" are not going to retweet something unless they find it meaningful.
yes, I think your point is correct but what I don't like the concepts behind the reddit new formula, because I really think that 100 upvotes and 30 downvotes are really different than 10 upvotes and 3 downvotes. Also time should absolutely appear in the equation in my opinion in the kind of discussion site like reddit or HN, since new comments, if as good as old comments, should be able to go up. And in this latest trick there is in my opinion the best way to avoid stagnation leading to the same top comments being voted up and up again. I'll experiment a bit about this issue, since I'm very interested in this issues. I happen to run oknotiize.virgilio.it that's the main social news site in Italy, and while we have voting on comments we currently use a chronological sorting. The votes are just used to colour the background red or green. Now I want to add sorting so I'll try to design an algorithm having the following goals:

a) time matters, so good old comments tend to go down, but this only happens in the first 24/48 hours, in the long run everything is much more ordered by score.
b) the score of a comment is roughly up/down but it tends to get better with more votes.
c) still much better a/b ratios tend to win against other comments having a lot of comments. For instance a 100 up and 50 down will win against a 10 up and 5 down in a strong way, but will be more or less the same score as a 15 up and 5 down.

I'll post here my final algorithm.
Did you notice that he says he's going to buy an iPhone because Microsoft's mobile offerings suck?
I'm leaning toward getting it.

The allergy argument begs the question, though. The CDC says that certain people should not get it, including "people who have had a severe reaction to an influenza vaccination" and "people who developed Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) within 6 weeks of getting an influenza vaccine." That suggests that the vaccine potentially gives rise to afflictions that otherwise wouldn't be acquired.

Essentially, I should not get a flu shot if I'm allergic to eggs or flu shots.
What games didn't work for you?
Of course, that means we'd be living in a future where the DNA sequence for the deadliest possible flu strain is computable. We'd have a pretty good reason to be alarmed every single day.
We posted this here because we're trying to figure out if hackers are orcs/goblins (fake entrepeneurs) or hobbits (real entrepreneurs).

Probably orcs cuz most hacks are consultants. Will the real hobbits please stand up :-)
Dell is starting to get that aesthetics matter quite a bit to some people. Their designs are coming around, slowly. For a product like the 3008wfp a refresh will take some time. They probably skipped 3009wfp to avoid another debacle like the 3008wfp launch.
Lung Cancer, How To Make Changes To Cure It Forever
Lung cancer treatment options are usually the same as prostate cancer treatment options or colon cancer treatment options. What I mean is that all forms of cancer have the same treatment options
I like the idea, but what's going to stop a bot from re-tweeting?
It's slower, though. It takes longer to search through the index than to just run the program in the windows directory. For programs I run frequently, I place 1 letter shortcuts in the windows directory. That way, to launch a program I just type Win+R+[char]+Enter. You can also launch shortcuts on the taskbar using Win+[0-9], but if you already have an instance it will just show you the existing one .. which is useless because that's what Alt+Tab is for.

Edit: You can also assign shortcuts like Ctrl+Alt+[char], but those are more awkward to use, and also will focus an existing instance instead of creating a new one.
Looks good but I think you need to work on improving the design of the page body (the header looks very nice & very professional) it brings to mind those dodgy download sites you sometimes come across on Google, I think it's the small, close together sans-serif font.

Also the twitter + contact details look a little awkward in the footer, all the content should be centered (there's more "white" (it's blue can I still call it that :-)) space on the right than on the left).

Apart from my obsessive nit-picking, good work.
I'm running a business where aspiring talented people pay a small fee to take part in a show, in hopes of gaining exposure.
I do use it every now and then, but personally even when types are the same, I don't really have issue with it. Makes it easy to see which type something is, and keeps things uniform and sane.

Shape foo = new Shape();

is often written separately:

Shape foo;

// Further down

foo = new Shape();

So in that instance it's easy to see in both places what foo is.

If you do have issues with the duplication, it wouldn't be crazy hard to just write a pre-processor to insert the Types on the left if you haven't specified them, before compilation.

I simply don't buy the notion that you can't write great code in language X. Language is largely irrelevant to how great the code is or isn't. Also irrelevant to how well you can scale, how successful your startup will be, etc etc

Great coders write great code. Languages are just ways of communicating that great code with machines, and other people.
The auto bailout: An inside look at the bankruptcies (Steven Rattner)
Where's John Meriwether? Why is the Steve Jobs photo from like 1985?
One thing to keep in mind about the size of Facebook's contribution is that not all of their status updates are public. Kara says they do 40M updates per day, but I can't imagine that very many of those are public.
Ewww. I'm sorry, but that page is so ugly my hand impulsively closed it before I could even begin to consider the content.
Oh, and there is an online tutorial at
http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/ProcessRecord/Tutorial
It will be if they release a HTML5 & Google Gears web app competitor to iTunes in addition to embedding the music player in search results.
How to Get Followers by Being a Polite Microblogger
> We have patched our SSH daemon to perform public key lookups from our MySQL database

That seems strange, that could be a PAM module at the least. If you patch SSHd then you are burdened with keeping up with changes, etc. There's even a module for direct mysql: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pam-mysql/
Agreed that this really isn't a big deal. However, if it's a step along the path to having some kind of streaming music integration in Android, that would be new. Total speculation.
Metasploit acquired by Rapid7
37signals Launches Haystack for Web Designers and Clients To Find Each Other
Thanks for this piece Spencer. Very inspiring indeed.

I really like the "Give the demo a try" feature on the landing page. Could you give any insight into whether this see-for-yourself feature really aided in getting signups..?

I was thinking about doing something similar for my site, which is why I'm asking...

Thanks and best of luck on your continued growth.
Nice Work...But as a end user i could find iPhone apps very easily in Apple AppStore...rather i find it very tough to search for mobile apps in other platforms..any plans to integrate that into your site..

And from your mission stmt, i feel you do wanna do that
That said, my point about Perl seems to have been unclear. I'm not saying that Perl has a reputation for ugliness because people change the syntax on the fly. I'm saying that layering macros in Perl is problematic because they interact badly with the syntax.

Ah, very good point, and well explained :) sorry for underestimating your first iteration.
Book Review: "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs"
Could be just me, but some of the data looks a bit...wonky.

For example: on the front page now is a listing for "Download Meter"

51 minutes ago, the price dropped from $2.99 to $1.99.

Then, 50 minutes ago, the price increased back to $2.99.

Is this right?
The thing is that if it is quality and you are a HN member and your first instinct is not to run to HN and find the article and vote on it if you like it, then this is an easy way to get you to the submission and see the relevant discussion and upvote it if you like it.
Aaaaaannnd... this is the number two reason Lisp's are not more successful (number one being the syntax, although that is somewhat related). Instead of helping to solve your problem, advocates (and the reference documents, "tutorials") want to engage in academic chest beating exercises.

How hard is it just to acknowledge, just a teeny bit, that PHP is more successuful than Lisp for real reasons -- not just because everyone but you is an idiot. That's nice that you think the string library is appalling. Perhaps it is -- but jesus, how do you even get work done with an attitude like that? Do you write everything you do from scratch?

Go write a graduate paper on the perfect string library and others can get real work done.
hell no.
Agreed, we're not dealing with cars here. The advancements in computers are radical and happen quickly, hence Moore's law. I have to agree, a comparison here is 4-doublings of processor power, meaning Windows 7 can be 16 times more CPU intensive than XP and appear to be the same speed, because it still only occupies say 5% of the total CPU usage.

The comparison here is between the Model T and a new Mustang, not between a '02 model and a 2010 model.
Overall an interesting slide-show, though it contains some silly points, such as:

o "New Computing Cycles Supported by 10X More Devices"

[The graph is extremely artificial. An extrapolation based on 4 made up points. And really, the growth in units of computers can be better explained by increasing market potential (i.e. cheaper, smaller => more users), not just more devices multiplying like so many rabbits gone rampant.]

o "Apple market share / impact should surprise on the upside for at least the next 1-2 years."

["should surprise"---what does that even mean? What if it doesn't surprise? Would that also be a surprise?]
Well quite. If Stallman's not happy with the GPL, he's only himself to blame!
No diagram? :(
Brain computer interfacing – Brain to Brain over Internet demo
i was building an online booking system, so it had a ton of custom calendar and payment capabilities built into the calendar. i hand-coded everything, right down to calculating whether it was a leap year or not, and how many days were in the existing month. stupid idea, should have just used a library to do it (although not many were available at the time).
Yeah, at first glance, it looks like a tag cloud with a bunch of adsense underneath. Funny how we interpret visual patterns...
Yes, This Weeks Finds is brilliant, though not so weekly these days.

Also, on the subject of links between topology and logic - Louis Kauffman has a lot of interesting writings:

http://www2.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/
this is trying to solve a problem that does not exist. People use search for definitive answers to their questions.. tweets hardly fit the bill.
have always wanted to build something like this
Off topic, but this is the first time I've seen typekit in action -- it's really cool!
Just saw this from 37s: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1976-launch-haystack-a-better...
Daring Fireball: Apple Netbook Claim Chowder
"Mutating virus" just sounds bad.
OK, the drop-down next to the reply button and that button itself are a bit wonky, but I never use them. I think the grouping of the other elements is one of the nicer aspects of Gmail.

Buttons represent actions. Clicking a button mutates the world. Links represent places and views. Clicking a link takes you somewhere or changes the appearance of something.

Links along the left are global. Buttons along the top and bottom of the center panel pertain to the current conversation or selection of conversations (depending on view). Links and buttons on each message operate on, oddly enough, that message.

Maybe Google's general style doesn't meld well with the way you think, but for many (most?) people, it does. It's a fantastic design.
"Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do."

Amen. At Wikispaces we absolutely obsessed over fast, human responses to support questions early on -- and still do. People are regularly shocked to get a response at all, let alone from a person, let alone in the span of a few minutes. That email can be the difference between getting frustrated and leaving for good vs. being a long term site user.
The Power of Symbolic Appropriation in Chinese Cyberspace
Too bad it doesn't also target web developers.
Can web programmers get in on this? What do I put for a picture if I mostly do back-end work?
This site actually is awesome. Personally I think it's very very ugly, but the information is excellent, and that's what it's all about.

It actually looks kind of like some of google's apps except without the attention to detail. Just not pleasing to look at. And the logo's really cheap.. come on guys, get a graphics designer.
The First Microsoft Store Opens Up Tomorrow In Scottsdale, Arizona
It's also a good sanity check on your payments process -- if you don't get charged, or you get charged too much, you'll know about it a lot sooner than if you waited for customer complaints to roll in.
I'd sign up if there was a way to make a list of apps I want but think are too expensive, and then have it email me if there is a sale on any of those. Can it do this?

I can't see myself checking the page everyday, i might as well check the app store.
I admit that I've only skimmed the article you cite, but while there are a few GUI features mentioned there, and I'm sure they're pretty and help to manage windows, etc, none of them seem to be particularly CPU hungry.

It's still a question of where 7 spends its CPU money compared with XP.
it brings to mind those dodgy download sites you sometimes come across on Google

I second that. That's what I thought it was at first. Add more space to each entry and make the fonts bigger.
We originally wanted to do this for web developers, but we didn't find it to be very useful without the visual component.

With web design, you can very quickly scroll through a lot of portfolios and find a style you like. That wouldn't work at all with web developers and backend code.

We're going to be launching the index page shortly and it'll become even clearer why this form only works for visual works.
Makes todays XKCD rather apt

http://xkcd.com/652/
yeah I even registered aHayStack.com and some other domain names - I don't think it would work as good for anyone with less "web design equity" as 37signals.
VentureFizz - Find all that is buzzing within Boston's Tech community
while our CEO has conniption fits over Microsofties sporting iPhones.

This would drive me nuts. The CEO should focus on fixing the things that makes their own employees not want to buy Windows Mobile phones, not fix the employees that don't want to buy them.
Olympic Committee warns man about sharing photos on website
People have wildly different notions about what they consider a reasonable price for something. Before I started making social apps, I was selling import books. I had people often paying $50 or more for something that in Japan might have cost $5. Definitely would have missed that if I had just tried to imagine what I would be willing to pay myself, only way I discovered the "real price" was by auctioning items first.
Seems like a market opportunity to me. How would a developer best pimp their wares?

Screenshots of sites they programmed wouldn't be as useful as they are for designers. Clients wouldn't understand code snippets...
@fjabre. We initially introduced the demo to help cut back on people signing up to see how the product worked with no intention of using it. Oddly enough, it actually reduced our total number of signups. But the users that make it through and signup are much more likely to be long term active users.
How are you doing the image generation for the "portfolio" shots? Via submitted images or urls or something else?
Great way to kill the momentum and innovation. The only reason Ruby is still relevant today is directly due to its dynamism and continuous evolution. If Python declares a moratorium, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.
One of the authors, Baez, wrote "Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity" a lovely, cheap, and fairly accessible intro to applications of topology in mathematical physics. Worth a glance if you find yourself wondering about all this
What's the plan for preventing the uploading of other people's work?
If I understand the article correctly, that's not the point. The point is that no license by itself is enough, because the copyright holder is not bound by the license.
And the overloading of the name continues...

(see http://haystacksearch.org/ for example)
I just started using it, and it seems prety basic (in a mostly good way), but the reliance on dynamic HTML drives me nuts.

How can I link to a specific item? How do I pass URLs to specific items in, say, irc?
If you see your work uploaded under someone else's account, you can write support for Haystack and we'll investigate. Doubt it'll be a major problem.
I get a "download quicktime" message and a link to the QuickTime download for "Mac and PC". Then on the download page the options are OSX Tiger or Leopard (or later; http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/) ... no link for other platforms. No mention of Linux.

I'll bet by PC they mean MS Windows anyway?

Rubbish.
Always tricky to get real figures, a lot of Apple's revenue comes from iphone/itunes and the details of the deals aren't public.

MS also has a lot of income from licenses/service/support it would still make money for years if it fired all it's devs tomorrow.

The point was that hype aside, an MS 'flop' still makes more money than you can imagine.
Better yet, just use Tig.
http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/
People upload their own images. We just resize them.
"I don't quite see what you're getting at here."

Without first establishing the number of gods and their qualities, questions about how they deal with evil seems pointless.
thx for clarifying this. still a strange example since the GIL is not thought to be a problem, from what i read on pydev.
I'm really impressed that Boo is mentioned as an influence. Don't see the ideas there, but I'm glad to see it spreading in some way.
The October peak for Western Europe isn't here.
I would like that language.

(I say, as I work on getting compute-effective-method working in Guile...)
If a lot of people have retweeted you, you are ranked higher on the list, which means that your retweet is ranked higher than retweet from a bot.
But in that case you wouldn't be dogfooding anyway.
It's not designed for people who just do back-end work. If you're a shop that does both front- and back-end work, then you're more than welcome to join though!
I'm not sure you need the visual component for developers - the hard part is getting a sense for what things cost, how long they take, and how people work.

Turns out those things are really hard to get a feeling for in isolation, but in comparisons, people are really good at it. I know I want an iPhone app; I come across http://www.flingmedia.com/, and the contact us form gives me his rates. Then you try to see if Brian's rates are valid; the pricing itself gives a marker of credibility. If Brian's rates are in line with what I see elsewhere, and his portfolio seems directionally suggestive enough that he can build what he says he can build, at the very least, I'm going to contact him. The conversation with Brian will tell me, as a client, if he'd be good to work with. Sure, it takes more work - you can't make judgments based so heavily on portfolios - but I really think Haystack would be really helpful to both clients and developers. (So, please, add developers!)

Semi-related, I'll bet you a dollar that people will be looking for local designers before they look at portfolios (rather than starting with portfolios) because you give them that option. For developers, I bet they'd do the same. You'll be able to track that relatively easily.
Yeah, I am in a similar position. Are you working on any application of your own? I am, so most of my effort goes towards that. I am interested in the questionairre idea as well and in fact I have a polling piece of code I am working up for my portfolio right now. I just keep the portfolio stuff separate from my main work - I don't want to address issues like scalability, security, cost of servers on something that I primarily want to use as a portfolio piece. I'm contemplating something open source as a better example than some pseudo-open portfolio piece that I just use to demonstrate some basic techniques.
Of course if you are really smart you build the same car and sell it as an Audi (to mac owners), VW (to laptop buyers), a Skoda (to desktop buyers) and a Seat (to netbook buyers).

Whereas if you are GM you build 10 different cars with different badges from different parts that all compete with each other in the same market.
Its actually a relative minimum of effort to respond very quickly - drastically reduces the number of outstanding issues to track. Ignoring tracking, it takes the same total effort to answer NOW as a week from now.
Now I wish my garage mechanic/doctor would operate this way.
Technology Review: Intelligence Explained
Margins on desktops went to nothing.
That was helped by people buying laptops for home use. Noticed how a laptop costs twice as much as a PC and isn't upgradeable so only lasts half as long - that's a nice business to be in.

Then everybody switched to netbooks which have a smaller margin than the bag you take it home in.
"Yet more to the point, encouraging numbers or not, the technology sector is unlikely to lead the economy out of the recession. More likely, it is the economy, supported by cheap money and stimulus programmes, that is pushing IT."

This is not supported at all in the article, imho. Isn't growing technology always driving economic growth from agriculture to plastics to computers?
Yeah, you're right, but you can probably also agree that honing in a certain market segment (graphics designers) is a better idea / opportunity than to go into competition with other typical job-related bulletin boards...
Apple Stock Hits An All-Time High
The WEB interface becomes useless, too. And forget about syncing with windows machines.
Come back and say same when installation 6 month old. ( If you don't reinstall meanwhile )
Agree with you Paras!

Shubhendu here by the way! :)

I was taken aback a little by the suggestion to use the UCI repository with R for beginning ML.

I would agree with your approach, I learnt all my basics from Andrew Ng's course and his course more or less follows what you said. :)
Is that true? If I use TrueCrypt to encrypt my entire 200GB hard drive, does it have to update every block on the disk when I write to a single file?
And I prefer the book by Bishop, It strikes a fine balance between the maths and the ideas.