skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
those 7th graders who are above the average for college bound high school seniors obviously need something besides normal high school

Yes. Those middle-school-age young people who take Talent Search testing through Northwestern University's Midwest Academic Talent Search

http://www.ctd.northwestern.edu/numats/

receive a booklet of academic planning advice after receiving their scores. Many of the specific points of that advice are impossible to implement in most states in the Midwest.
"Frugal" assumes that you have money and choose not to use it. It also assumes that the current recession is caused by people's fears, and if they could only think rationally things would go back to "normal".

That's fundamentally flawed.

You can't be frugal when what you are is better described as poor. I know it's difficult for the boomers to understand this, but their "normal" is in fact a grand exaggeration that is not-sustainable. The average American carries far too much debt, live well beyond their means, and has enjoyed historically low interest rates.

The reality is that this debt needs to be repaid, if not at this moment, soon enough. All we've done to "correct" this recession is throw money at the worst parts in hope that it all goes away. At best, all that we've done is delay the inevitable accounting that must be done.

Prices are too high - across the board - for the average wage. People cannot sustainably live middle class lifestyles on the average wage. Even better, people's idea of what constitutes a middle class lifestyle has been inflated into a unmaintainable ideal. That needs to adjust, and it's going to hurt whether we like it or not.

The problem with bailouts and such is that all they do is pass this eventual day of reckoning down to the next generation. (I suppose that fits with the boomer "me" ethos perfectly, after all.)

The problem with articles like this is that they live in some sort of fairy land where people are still able to spend more, and just choose not to.
Mixpanel can do cohort analysis for you.
What "Super Achievers" Know About Time Management
Agreed, though you'd have to have been living under a rock not to be aware of the huge impact of fiberoptics even a decade ago. Mr Kuo made his discovery in 1996 and retired in 1996. I wish they would try to be a bit more timely with these things; sometimes it feels like 'oops, that guy is really old now - we'd better give him the prize before he passes away'. Oh well - I'm glad to see these advances recognized, since I use both CCDs and fiberoptics on a regular basis.
Aside from that, they do realize that the internet is an international medium and the vast majority of it isn't subject to FCC rules, right?

Speaking of which, as a non-US citizen, I'd like to invite companies to send me free products so I can say nice things about them on my blog!
And of course profit is related to earnings more than just to revenue. It's not clear to me that Facebook's services are inexpensive enough to run and compelling enough to users over the long term to build a profitable business.
Motion graphics/film professionals form professional previsualization society
Discontinuing Resourcelogic
Creating a Healthy Work Environment
Where does it say you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theatre? Where does it say you can't advertise your new wonder drug by claiming it cures cancer and has no side-effects? Free speech is not an absolute right, and commercial speech is the most regulated type of speech act; when you take a payment for what you say then you are obligated to disclose this fact.

If bloggers want to be treated like real, grown-up journalists then they have to start living by the same rules that these journalists live by.
Also think about the potential of using the "via Tweetdeck" etc. links to directly point to the app store. I understand that developers like them to point to their site, so maybe developers could choose. It would be interesting to compare the conversion rates of both, a twitter owned app store (or oneforty for that matter) and a developers homepage.
If someone like that could be the CEO of Microsoft, anyone can!
I don't understand where Oneforty is adding value for developers. If you are a developer of a Twitter app then why would you want to drive traffic there? I would think you'd want to drive traffic away from there and toward your own site. As soon as users end up on Oneforty then (a) the paradox of choice kicks in and (b) if you convert a sale, you are forced to share a big chunk of revenue with Oneforty.

Maybe there is some added value that I don't see. But, really, it looks a lot like Yelp, GetSatisfaction, or Ripoff Report: they create this big community focused on saying stuff about your app and it ends up costing you if you participate (in $$$) or if you don't (in customers).

Twitter already has an incredibly effective app-discovery mechanism: the "from AppName" that appears on every tweet on the website. And, that mechanism is 100% free (for now). I don't really see how oneforty improves upon that.

Twitter app development is kind of a no-mans-land right now. Any day, Twitter can change the cost model of developing apps for their platform. Recently, Twitter just made app development much more expensive (in manhours) by adding features that are fairly complicated to implement. In the future it seems likely they will ask for some direct financial consideration too--e.g. charging for use of their trademarks and/or charging for increased API rate limits. So there's a lot of risk from the cost side, because you don't know how much it is going to cost to develop & maintain the app.

Plus, there is the problem that 30% of 0 is zero while 30% of $1.00 is far from zero. These AppStore taxes hurt people who charge money for their apps and help the people who don't. In fact, the people who charge money end up subsidizing their own competition in a not-so-indirect way.

Now, maybe Oneforty has some plans to add value that is worth more than the value they are taking from app developers. But, reading through the material they present, I haven't seen it. I sincerely hope that they come up with a business model that is a net benefit to themselves and to app developers. But, until then, It seems less risky for (commercial) app developers to nicely ask Oneforty to pull their apps' listings from the site.
A person should not be deemed a criminal unless that person "crossed over that line knowing what he or she was doing."

We used to say, "Ignorance is no excuse for the law." The situation now though, is that there are so many laws and regulations that it is impossible not to be ignorant. Not only do we not know the laws, but we don't know how to find out what the laws are. Small business owners are especially prone to mistakes considering there are corporate laws, civil laws, tax laws, employment laws...
Google launches WhatBrowser.org, talks web browsers for Mom and Dad
The point is that some people are too blinded by their ideology to even come up with a crude solution, let alone an elegant one.
Say Apple hosted an online "poll" asking "Are our laptops the best? Yes/No/Probably" with a "see results so far" link. Would that be "publicity"? Or would it land them in the poo legally?
Fascinating. Hopefully this research will dispel biases on both sides.
I do see potential here. Think about better statistics for developer, a "from AppName" link that goes directly to the store site (if they can prove better conversion rates), or a centralized payment mechanism for premium apps (hard to achieve but not impossible).
Because it's much easier to communicate directly than by using computer : you don't have the same workflow, for instance, and in my opinion, when you're not in the same room, you partner is passive.
Tweetmeme Adds Analytics To Make Sense Of Twitter Links
Microsoft is a large company. There are different divisions with different objectives. When one part of the company tries to extend the olive branch and you come back with the pitchforks, that's not exactly encouraging the division that may be on your side that you're worth fighting for.

Who do you think has a better chance of changing Microsoft's policies? RMS or a group of people working internally?
There are testing packages for a couple languages (Python and Lua, for sure) that let you just copy in the text directly from the interpreter and use them as regression tests.
Icelandic town turned into one giant speaker system
CSI | Superstition Bash
Paul Rand on creating a memorable brand
The one that isn't a PDF.
part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxiDNdM2-bM

part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bA1LdQknbk
> Show me an API that can do that without fork.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682429%28VS.85%29....
Entrepreneurs are crazy.
For me the first step in figuring out a solution is to clearly understand the problem. It always seems like the solution is far easier than that first part. Well... then there's implementation :)
I've seen 40-50% improvements from APC in PHP, it would be interesting to see these same tests with byte code cache implemented in each platform.
In the first case, the speech becomes an action in the same way that politely requesting that a bank teller give you all the money in the bank or you'll set off a bomb is an action. In the second case, you're defrauding people and endangering their lives, but it's not the speech that's regulated; it's the selling. There's no law that says I can't publish an article saying that eating a pound of carrots a day will cure cancer.

Of course, I do think professional bloggers should hold themselves to standards of journalistic ethics, possibly even forming an organization that gives out certifications.
If you'll excuse the pseudo code...

Pipe pipe1 = new Pipe()
Pipe pipe2 = new Pipe()
NewProcess("cmd_a", null, pipe1)
NewProcess("cmd_b", pipe1, pipe2)
NewProcess("cmd_c", pipe2, null)
Yup, if what you describe is true (and I suspect it to be true), I will be really interesting in knowing what keeps people coming back to the game and actually paying real money for extra points.

Because if it were just handful of PHP scripts, hey, I can code them in a weekend :)
Facebook is in fact profitable.
Not to be negative, but are there really "hackers" out there that don't know how a for loop works?
For those who don't know who he is:

He designed the IBM and the Next Computer logos as well as many other well known logos.
I eagarly await the day when someone's age is no longer a determining factor in how cool, interesting, or innovative someone's work is, especially in programming and technology.
Microsoft's value has been falling because it is obvious that software commoditization threatens their revenues. Windows and Office isn't packed with growth potential. No amount of "vision" or "leadership" will defy fate.

Many products launched during Ballmer's tenure have been successful. More importantly, Microsoft has been able to move away from their core business.

* Sharepoint (A billion dollar product and a multi-billion dollar industry.)

* Axapta (purchased)

* Great Plains (purchased)

* Solomon (purchased)

* Xbox/Xbox 360

* BizTalk

* .NET (An application stack to compete with J2EE, unthinkable in 1999.)

----

During the same period, a number of Microsoft products went from minor items to major contenders in their industries.

* MS SQL was a Sybase clone in 1999; in 2009 it's a price/performance champ.

* Exchange was only used in "Microsoft shops" in 1999. Today it's the de facto standard.
And 'gross' would probably be quite apt.
LenPEG: Image compression at a 6,291,456 to one ratio
Not quite the same thing, you are talking about QAing the product.

Test driven development or more simply unit testing code, is writing automated tests that ensure your code at the smallest unit you can access ( e.g. a single method ) is doing what you expect under all conditions.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development
and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_test
While true that disclosure aids the minority party, and both sides pay some degree of lip service to the issue of transparency, it is still important for American democracy that our political leaders make bills available to the full Congress and to the public for at least 72 hours before a vote.
Huge, huge news - this may be the decision that helps us get first sale doctrine rights for DLC.
That's barely even testing, and it's certainly not TDD. If I play through the feature I just coded or the bug I just fixed, I can verify that it's doing what I think it's doing, but I need outside verification that it's correct. In effect, I can verify my code's precision (it's doing precisely what I told it to do), but not it's accuracy (if my idea of a feature is inaccurate, my own testing won't catch that).

That having been said, TDD and automated testing can definitely make some headway into game development, but there are a whole host of challenges and questions to surmount there, especially for code-bases that are going to get stripped down to bare-bones every 1-3 years for a new game, if they get reused at all, so the tolerance for hacky code is quite a bit higher.
Ask HN: Review my friends website: plushcuffs.com
My friend built a website to sell a new kind of travel pillow she's been making. I thought I could be more helpful in this endeavor, but I realized I know very little about online businesses that sell real, physical stuff. Anyone have any experience with this? How effective is SEO/SEM/other marketing methods? How important is AB testing pricing/branding/positioning? Thanks!
It's a lot easier than you think. When I was a kid I wrote longer programs in Basic using paper and pencil, because it was a lot easier for me than typing. I would type in the program after I was pretty sure it was right. The errors were almost always local. It seemed so easy to check the high-level structure of something when I could spread it out on the ground in front of me. Later, in college, I always printed out drafts of my papers and marked them up completely before I started editing.
Obligatory Ayn Rand quote (via Dr. Ferris, in Atlas Shrugged):

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt."

My personal theory of how this situation came about, however, could be called the "Walker, Texas Ranger" explanation. I think some lawmakers/enforcers turn vigilante when they are convinced a would-be criminal has gotten away with some potentially-criminal act because of how the law is written, so they seek to change the law.

As hackers, I assume we all have a lot of experience with [computer] code, and we're aware that a small change "here" can have unexpected side-effects "there." I know that when I learned about SML, Lisp, and functional programming without "side effects" I was blown away that it was possible to formally prove the execution of some functions. In other words, it is possible to write good, clean, predictable code.

Nothing like that exists for legal code, however. It's a tangled mass of declarative assertions, nested dependencies, GOTO statements, (naive) version control, and namespaces. A vigilante action to alter some part of the code essentially has unpredictable consequences for other parts of the code.

The changes couldn't be measured if you wanted. In a management sense, the project is totally out of control. Big surprise, then, that private enforcement and prisons are a growth industry. Some people see this for what it is: an opportunity. Just make sure you're an investor instead of a "customer."
Good concise article. The real gem here is about compartmentalizing. I think this is the real key to getting things done. And I think the #1 thing that makes it difficult to compartmentalize is working longer hours than you should.

I find that when I put in extra long hours I have trouble "turning it off" when I get home to relax. Not having that recharge time makes me stressed out and therefore a less effective worker when I pick-up where I left of the next day. It's a vicious cycle.
Not the most flexible DSL I've ever seen.
"real, grown-up journalists"

Where does the rule say anything about "journalist"? The rule appears to apply to anybody who says anything on Facebook to their friends. It appears to apply if you got a free ticket in your cereal box for a movie, then talk about it on Twitter. At all. $11,000 if you don't "disclose" in an unspecified manner. It appears to be incredibly broad.

Even in the journalism case I consider it dubious, but you seem to be doing the same thing the government is, assuming that all Internet traffic is "journalism" and must be regulated as such. That's not even remotely true. It is as true as saying all spoken words should be regulated as journalism, for pretty much the same reasons; sure, some vanishing fraction of spoken words are journalism but trying to regulate it all as if it were is an enormous category error.
The death of advertising authenticity
Twitter already has "from AppName" go directly to the developer's website, which is his own private app store under his full control.

In the long term, I think Amazon, PayPal, and mobile carrier payment mechanisms will work well for selling direct to customers. Amazon and PayPal charge less than 10% per transaction. I think in a couple of years, mobile carriers will be charging ~10% (like the Japanese carriers do). Once this happens 70%/30% will seem ridiculous and will only be tolerated for platforms that give developers no alternative, like the iPhone.
HN: Review my little Twitter app
72 hours even sounds like too little time.
* How to Write a Spelling Corrector http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

* Case Study: Metaclass Hacking in fetchmailconf http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch09s01.html
I definitely watch movies and read book, but I feel like I come away from them with something, unlike with video games.

I get that some people do feel like they get something out of playing video games, and I'm not indicting them.
any chance you can post the binaries on mediafire? seems like their server has gone down.
Low tweeting is a big issue, since it negates some of the Twitter narrative. The whole "pulse of the planet" realtime search thing isn't really valuable if most of the users aren't contributing to the corpus.

Also, if it's just a handful of the users creating the value, then the switching costs are much lower. You'll go to "where the celebrities are" (which may turn out to be Facebook, or something else) and not the harder to move "where are your friends are".
I don't think you understand the significance of the word "driven." Coding something and then testing it is not TDD. In TDD, you don't write any application code that a failed test doesn't demand in order to pass—and even then, only just enough to make that test pass, even if it just means alwars returning 4 from a rand function.

Of course, a "play test" is not an unit test, or an integration test (and is only mildly similar to an acceptance test.) Playtest-driven development would be an entirely new affair, likely involving gameplay freeze-states and kept in version control, and a constant numerical analysis for the player's emotional state (perhaps using some sort of face-recognition) given alternate code paths.
Is it just me or Palm continuously swung and missed with their new development platform?

Palm has done next to nothing to really differentiate itself from their competitors. The Pre has been out for several months and its just getting paid apps now. Now they are opening up deployment but not until the end of the year. From my understanding, the Pre is a great piece of hardware. But Palm's execution has been extremely lackluster and its not at all surprising that they aren't hitting sales expectations.
I am reminded of the Feynman Algorithm:

Write down the problem.

Think real hard.

Write down the solution.

The Feynman algorithm was facetiously suggested by Murray Gell-Mann, a colleague of Feynman, in a New York Times interview.

The first step is usually the hardest.
If you needed this article, you didn't belong in the interview in the first place.
If the new task can work in isolation, then yes, fork seems ideal. If the tasks need to interact, then threads seem (to me) more useful.

I've written web services in the past with databases storing data (like most web applications do) and I've often wished that the potentially many processes could just be multiple threads in a single process instead, so I could have them just share an array of objects without the overhead of a database server.
How to crack a master lock
When I took an AI class back in University, the professor noted that the term AI is usually only applied to the problems we can't solve. As soon as we determine an algorithm for something, they no longer call it AI.

So technically, it was a Data Mining class I guess.
And some one said HN doesn't accept sensational headings.

PS: It was in the days I started here. Fair enough, it has been a while.
Maintaining group-based routing tables for individual pieces of content as opposed to hosts that serve many pieces of content is a hard problem, and no vendor has solved it.
VPNs however add considerable latency as well as cost and complexity. Its not like there is no down side to using VPNs. If your using SSH and a web browser which isn't susceptible to the current SSL exploits, I don't see why I would want to use a VPN over Wi-Fi.
This is a common cliche but I am not too sure there is really a correlation, just think of

- Civilizations

- The Sims

- Snood (Not talked about much but used to be installed to many many computers, I would suspect it means revenues)

- World of Goo (Sure it is not super big but if you consider the cost compared to popularity, it is interesting)

- All the EA sports games

- All the poker and board games

or many more where violence is not the main topic.
Fortunately, what the media decides to take interest in does not necessarily coincide with what is actually cool, interesting, innovative, or profitable. But if you want press for the glorification of your ego, there are a variety of avenues you can take.
That's part of the problem. Even in web services, a 90% profit margin is unrealistic. So if you're doing the same volume as Google (operating margin of around 30%) but making only 5% RPU, you're probably not profiting much.

That's a lot of why Facebook is only barely profitable, whereas Google was making a killing when it had their traffic levels.
For beginner hackers. Intermediate use Arduino. Expert build their own. 1337 buy the ones Expert built and claim them for their own.
Somewhat simplistically stated, but nonetheless rings true. The ease in which you can slap together a simple banner ad, or rig up some cheap, malware-infested flash game, has rather seriously impacted the reputation of online advertisers.

Somewhere along the way, marketing forces've forgotten that reputation is often just as important as exposure - that there is, in fact, such thing as bad publicity. At least, in the long-term.
I used to make these types of games all the time when I was younger, and they're still pretty popular. I guess it all started with A3 http://alienaa.com and some space trading game I forget the name of. They were probably just a natural evolution of BBS games. Making text-based browser games was why I even started programming to begin with when I was 14 or 15, and for a while there were a bunch of games derived from code that I wrote and handed out long before I really knew how to do open source. Seems stupid of me now to have never thought of trying to make money off of them.