skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Especially since it features a fairly prolific member of the Pratchett Usenet (alt.fan.pratchett) community :)
I agree with the strategy, although gmail is still reasonably small fry compared with yahoo + hotmail.

People probably keep harping on about live typing because it made no sense to include it. It's a gimmick rather than a useful feature.

Also it is too complicated for most people. You can't just ignore arguments and call them a 'meme' :)
I think it's a prank set up by Ruby users, but don't see it anywhere in the text.
I agree the sign up process is very slick - I like it a lot.
Another article on HN is an interview with Terence Tao. In it, he references these rules for collaboration:

http://www.math.ufl.edu/misc/hlrules.html

Part of it is that one shouldn't worry about how "good" a comment is before posting. Just post, and if its good, it'll get used.

I admit, this may not be as good an idea when you have a lot of amateaurs, but I think having a rating system would deter a lot of people.
How to capture game video for YouTube quickly and easily
I think your writing was fine! I like seeing some style with programming talk :D
How to run a con
Striking the right tone is hard, and you can't please everyone. Personally, I like a slightly conversational tone, but it's easy to got to far with it, and it just becomes a waste of words. You're writing to please the reader, not the writer ( see http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=875094 ).

E.g. "Foreaches. Foreaches is like.. a regular For that gave up alcohol, decided to shave daily, and bought a new suit. It's prettier, and more effective. "

I've been programming in C# for years, I know foreach. It's a workhorse feature that I use daily. There are similar constructs in Ruby and PHP and others.
He's a slippery fish. I remember when I was at Linuxcare, in the middle of the dot com boom, and all the Linux companies would have just fallen all over themselves to hire him, but he never went for any of them, which I think ended up being an excellent choice.
I guess we will just get smaller devices, then.
+1 for a -hardass flag, that would be awesome
At first I wanted to say "bah humbug" but it really does seem to hit a sweet spot:

-Common modern features(implicit typing, generics, GC, iterator syntax)

-Source-to-source C, so it is compatible with just about everything

-Doesn't attempt to reinvent libraries

-Doesn't attempt to reinvent the build system

-Doesn't diverge strongly on syntax(apart from supporting the new features)

These are the kind of things that make a language easy to pick up and start using :)
> Is that normal?

Yes. You're not "meant" to be able to backspace over content that wasn't added in your current transaction. Which is really inconvenient, because if you delete things when you're in command mode then it overwrites what's in your buffer, which is often convenient.

In vim you can simulate this by doing

:set compatible
Is the Exercise Cool-Down Really Necessary?
I love the service. Its a great idea, and the scriptability of it makes integration into an existing pipeline extremely easy.

All praise aside I cannot say I personally would use it much beyond experimenting with it. My project uses google maps too extensively and ends up failing out too much. Thats more my problem than yours as scripting events for GMaps would be overly complicated and useful to only a few.

Thanks for the demo!
A pay-as-you-go pricing option might be useful. The monthly pricing model works well if you plan to run the tests every day/week, but I'm guessing that a lot of people will want to run the cross-browser tests on every new deployment, but perhaps not between deploys.
Agree...I was signed up and writing scripts within 2 minutes. Could be made quicker by using Facebook Connect or Google Auth.
How many flights of stairs? I used to live in floor 5, and can run up all the way without getting out of breath. However I tried to run to floor 16 in a hotel a few days ago, and was powered out around floor 8.
I agree with your comments but I feel that contributions to opensource projects are good for your soul and good for your CV even if they're only used by a handful of people in the world.

I've found that hobby code I've worked on is much better quality than the stuff done to deadline during working hours. Its a good to be able to say 'see my code at myproject.blah.org' and give prospective employers a chance to see what you're capable of. I'm impressed that you've written a CD burner even if I've never used it.
I wrote an OSPF packet injector. But no one uses it. :(
It's a brilliant read.

With that said; you can tell in the first chapter or 2 his disease is having an effect. The first chapter especially has some clunky moments :( After that it warms to it's stride till the end when it finishes somewhat cheerily for a Pratchett book...

It's a sad sad shame that we might not see many more brilliantly witty Disc World novels :(
Google Maps is actually one of the sites which we use internally for testing Go Test It -- many features of it can be automated quite nicely. Particularly with such complex JavaScript, you don't really have a choice but to test in every browser you want to support!
Quick Linux and Windows OpenVPN How To and tutorial, including VPN routing
To get somewhere, you already have to be there
That's something we're definitely thinking about. For the time being you can just sign up for a month, then cancel it again -- there's no minimum contract.
Sun, Sand and Startups III is on Tonight
I like it.

Sign-up nice and concept good.

Couple of comments/bugs:
1) When you first record something and click 'run' it brings up a confusing dialog box with a textbox. I figured out eventually this is a save dialog box, but it isn't obvious

2) Appreciate the need to queue things up, but I didn't find the queue status thing very intuitive.

3) I used news.bbc.co.uk as my test site, and all the IE ones died opening the front page.
Peter Diamandis, XPrize Founder: On Colonizing Space, etc.
>> I guess its worth pointing out that I'm not sure where I stand on this... as below, I'm sort of playing devil's advocate.

I also have some concerns about full transparency, just on the general basis that "the best laid plans..." often "gang aft aglay". But all bills should be posted online, where they can be easily found and searched, at least a week before the vote takes place. No ands, ifs, or buts.

I'd also love to see time reports of our hard working public servants. You can discover a lot by softing through the details.

>> I think having every report written by the government posted online could potentially make it difficult to be honest in the reports.

Yes. Not sure what to do about that.

Slightly OT, but I would love to see a law that requires every scientific paper that used public funding be posted online, for free, within a year of dead tree publication.
Reddit Awards
The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you.

100% accurate. We essentially con people when doing pen testing (talking our way into buildings) and you use the exact same techniques. Make the other person feel like they are in a position of power, they are doing you a good deed, they are winning or that it is their idea.

However with that said...

Leil Lowndes talks a lot about WIIFM in her books (Whats In It For Me). She makes a solid point that in any interaction people look for what they can gain from it; especially so from strangers. If they have to do something there should be something in it for them.

The con mentioned in the article works mostly because there is no percieved loss to the guy at the till. The conman clearly knows that the guy wont have $100 of his own on hand. If he did it probably wouldn't have worked. By increasing the focus on the WIIFM aspect ($100) by minimising the risk/loss aspect is what makes this con work so well.

It's why when I walk up and flirt with a pretty receptionist she will be reasonably eager to help me out in getting into X building if I mention I will be coming back each day for the next week etc. :) (just one example)

(I find this stuff amazingly interesting :D)
Friendly compilers surely aren't so bad.

No, they aren't bad. Cryptic error messages are just annoying.

Would "inferred" be a better word than "guessed" in that context? It sounds more deterministic, conveys more of a meaning of "worked it out for itself from the context" rather than "rolled the dice and took a stab at what you might mean".
Common Lisp Cookbook
Comments and Criticism about the HSBC bank, impartially gathered from Twitter
Ask HN: How to divide shares
A friend has approached me with an idea. There is an understanding that each of us would have the following responsibilities:

Friend:

- Financing (running costs, marketing, additional development, etc...)
- Product direction / features.

Myself:

- Initial development, and running tech aspects.
- Product direction / features.

The product is an enterprise SaaS with potential to grow (or collapse) in different directions.

My questions are:
Should I stick to a contractual agreement ($/hr or % of profit), or a partnership (shares). For partnership: how would we divide shares and structure company.

We both have little clue.

edit: formatting
Outstandingly good news for science, and partly - we suspect - due to the enormous attention this has been receiving in the blogosphere.
Thanks for your comments -- I know we need more work on the user experience. We'll also look into those IE failures.
Absolutely agree. It's always been targeted at convincing management. "can do everything", "empower business users", etc.
Object-oriented programming with ANSI-C [scribd]
WWII Monopoly sets with hidden Escape Maps
Ruby Grammer
Looks very cool. Any thoughts on adding closures?
Microsoft Confirms Data Recovery for Sidekick Users
Wired.com’s Crazy Flyer Survives with Mental Health Intact - Mostly
Collaborative filtering and how it's going to help us consume
What problems does Google Wave solve?
T-Mobile Sued For 'Catastrophic' Losses Of Data
What is jsHub?
To encourage the developers to make more games that you like. Because your inbuilt sense of fairness makes you want to reward them for something whose value to you is more than the minimum amount. Because some bit of your brain always acts as if other people might be watching, and you don't want to appear mean. Because playing the game, or reading the 2dboy blog, or something, has made you feel like you have some sort of personal connection with the developers, and you want them to do well. Because you want to trade off giving them more with keeping more for yourself, and at very low prices too little of what you pay goes to them rather than Paypal.

(For example.)
How the Linux desktop shoots itself in the foot.
Just out of curiosity, do you work for Microsoft or one of their partners?
Yes, I definitely agree that as a procedural rule, anything that can become law should be posted for a good period of time (with all sorts of exceptions for emergencies... e.g. funding to help a disaster area).

I think the necessary action is some sort of education program (yeah, yeah, it'll never happen, I know...). If we can somehow educate people to never get mad at a fact (a quote from a political science textbook I read once) then we might be able to do this.

In any event, I think this sort of education is necessary because as things stand, reports are often treated as opinions, which is bad.

Edit:
Slightly OT, but I would love to see a law that requires every scientific paper that used public funding be posted online, for free, within a year of dead tree publication.

Its a interesting idea, but we'd need to find a way to compensate journals. I think they get boatloads of money from academic institutions paying for access to their publications (correct me if I'm wrong).
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing Only Simple On the Outside
Simple: at GitHub we hire "The Girl or Guy Who Wrote X," where X is an awesome project we all use or admire.

A few suggestions:

Change "we all" to "many people".

Change "or admire" to "to make money" or "to get their jobs done".

Suddenly you've opened this up to a much larger population of programmers who have done great work. Who says that the valuable work you've done has to be open source?

If you say, "I've written the software that thousands of people use to process millions of orders," there are plenty of people who will want to hear more. Then you can tell them.
I think this is a wise hiring strategy. First of all: github is a ruby folks stuff, so "X" don't need to be Apache. It needs to be an interesting project, maybe related to the Ruby community or Web development. So there are a fairly large "X"es.

Also to write free software that is recognized as useful, is a major hint of a possibly good programmer: it means that he is passionate, and is able to identify a problem an write and design a good solution. And there is a meritocratic salt in this soup, as open source can be considered, in some way, a way to show that you as a programmer are worth of consideration.

So I admire github for this hiring strategy.

Edit: is just my feeling or I'm feeling some open source hostility in this thread?
I agree. I have a work that pays me well now (it was hard to do the transition between what paid me well and what I liked but didn't pay because I didn't know about... I'm now at some point in-between). I'm not starving, but I have to work full time. But I'm keeping away from business stuff, at least for a while, to learn more of the things I find worth learning.
Didn't Linus work for Transmeta for most of the boom?
Actually, the double slash is useful for at least one thing. You can use it in web pages to make relative URLs which preserve the protocol, but change the server.

Suppose you have pages on a server www.example.com that reference images on an asset host assets.example.com. Usually, you would use a full URL in your HTML to reference your images:

http://assets.example.com/image.png

This is fine if all your accesses to www.example.com are done over HTTP. But what if you want to use HTTPS sometimes? Unless you change those URLs to use the HTTPS protocol as well, the browser may give the 'mixed secure and insecure content' warning.

If you specify the image URLs as relative URLs in the form:

//assets.example.com/image.png

then when a user visits http://www.example.com/ their browser will fetch the image from http://assets.example.com/image.png . But when they visit https://www.example.com/ their browser will fetch the image from https://assets.example.com/image.png .

Without the double slash, this kind of relative URL would be indistinguishable from the more common relative URL which just means a different path on the same server:

/assets.example.com/image.png
And the answer (from the article and what I've read elsewhere): no, not as far as any study has ever been able to determine.
I want this toy: augmented reality world map and orrery
Clojure's first year
I'll be in CA from Oct 20th to 28th and would be definitely interested in joining. Coming from Estonia, close to Finland.
The Scalaris DHT supports range queries, I think.

http://www.zib.de/CSR/Projects/scalaris/
Isn't that all pretty much taken care of with forums, google groups? (Attaching files, giving everyone the same view, keeping people added, etc)

Why would you use wave over a forum/google group etc?
Clickable link: http://go-test.it/hackernews
> A year ago today I 'released' Clojure, by sending a message to my jFli and Foil mailing lists

Happy birthday and thanks to Rich!
Forums, Google groups, etc, don't have the "edit other people's posts" Etherpad-like collaborative editing. Most of them aren't branchable in the same way Wave is. They generally don't have the privacy controls of a Wave. They don't weave from email-like to IM-like like Wave can. They're not built to allow native clients to interact. And they don't have any federation ability.

You could say that Wave is a bit like Email, Basecamp, Campfire, Etherpad, and a bunch of other collaboration tools, all merged into one unified interface. I'd be scared if I was 37-Signals. From everything I've heard, the feature Basecamp users most like is the discussion system... with Wave, that becomes a lot less worth paying for.
A forum doesn't pop in your mailbox, I would say, simply? And it's not personal, it's public.
How does this differ from Selenium or what the guys at Sauce Labs are doing?
Hardy-Littlewood Axioms of Collaboration
If you aren't doing anything extremely strenuous, then no it probably isn't necessary. But I've done a 100m and 200m sprint and me slamming the breaks at the end generally results in either me feeling faint or simply passing out.

I've never really paid attention to why a cool down was necesary, nor did any of my coaches require it. I just did it because after a good run your sweat glands are wide open and it feels uncomfortable to stand still in the humid, Florida sun.
Very good idea, I could see myself using this...
I didn't find anything new in this article.

But to have a few use-cases, I found this lifehacker article better (http://lifehacker.com/5381219/google-waves-best-use-cases) (it is a crowdsourced collection from users on how they would use google wave, rather than one person speculating on various uses).

The use-case from the air traffic controller seems to be the best - as if wave was an app made for traffic controllers!
I highly recommend the Pragmatic Programmer's book on Clojure. For me, the concepts are new and interesting and may even be applicable to what I'm working on today, and will most certainly be applicable in the multi-core future.
there is only one agreed-on fact about the possible risk of suddenly stopping intense exercise. When you exercise hard, the blood vessels in your legs are expanded to send more blood to your legs and feet. And your heart is pumping fast. If you suddenly stop, your heart slows down, your blood is pooled in your legs and feet, and you can feel dizzy, even pass out.
I found the lifehacker article to be a rosy-eyed view of what people would use their idea of what Wave is for. Some of them just wouldn't fly with the current UI and so on. swombat's more on the button as to what Wave actually is.
Same for me in Safari 4.0.3.
You weren't meant to have a boss
http://paulgraham.com/boss.html
Accoding to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/health/02well.html?_r=2... , cooling(as in taking it slow) in marathons helps with the fainting/passing out.

Wasn't there this story of a 40+ european guy winning grueling competitions based on sheer stamina than performance.It was a story on Nytimes, couldn't find it.
Yeah, but I can't believe that all those companies didn't make him some very tempting offers.
The 'We Need To Own' Baloney
IPhone app that helps you pick up women. Is it vulgar or awesome?
is this it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/sports/playmagazine/05robi...
The problem with cable news thinking
You can tell google groups to send emails. Not sure if you can set them to private. Obviously you can do a private install of a forum and restrict access.
BlackBerry Storm Specifications, will go head-to-head with iPhone
Intro to Comp Sci language breakdown
I'm interested to know what universities offer (or offered) as the programming language(s) in their introductory programming courses.

If you majored in computer science, or if you know about the introductory computer science program at some university, could you leave a message here with: University Name / Language(s) / Time Frame (or year)

I'm not interested in their relative merits, just the hard facts: what, where, when.
This is great - I was looking for the "guide to productivity" last week and realized it was gone. I looked for a cache of it on google but didn't take the extra time to look @ archive.org.

These are some of the best startup articles ever posted on the internet.
I went to UConn, which taught C++ until 2004 or so, at which point they switched to Java.

I also know that MIT used to run with Scheme, until just recently (2008?), when they switched to Python.
Fantastic resource, well done for bringing them all together again. Would make a great book!
is this something you own or something you built for a client?

I'm just wondering why you can't upload a secret "bio" page on the app somewhere that only you know the url to...
Stratoshield: Nathan Myhrvold explains how to save the planet
yeah Sharepoint's standard wiki isn't very good! But you can install 3rd party wiki implementations for SP that are better, I believe.
Why even ask ? Isn't that obvious ?
Do Millennium Villages work? Why we may never know
As a sidenote, I quit Reddit a couple years ago as the signal:noise gradually gave way and it became more and more filled with "puns" that weren't funny and less filled with smart people talking about interesting things.

Only recently have I started going back - because /r/IAmA/ has had some really, really good and informative entries in it. For Reddit refugees, it might be worth going back to have a look. There's still lots of goofy new Reddit banter in there, but it's reminiscent of some of the older thoughtful discussions that were once had.
I swam for a D-III school and our coach insisted on a long cool down after every swim meet. It was just ingrained in me that if I didn't do a cool down that I would have built up lactic acid or something that would make me stiff and unable to practice well the next day.

Then one year we went to watch a meet between Texas and Michigan, two top D-I teams that have Olympic champions. At the end of the meet, both teams just packed up and went home, and not a single person did a cool down. I was shocked! It made me realize that a cool down probably wasn't necessary, but I was still required to do it anyways. Our coach didn't really reply to me when I asked him about it.

One thing that those teams did was stretch A LOT before the meet. I think they did something like a full 40 minutes of stretching before they even got in the pool.
Indeed =) It will be implemented very simply, as in the latest Vala release (in fact they should even be compatible).
What were the several other solutions that combined to do Sharepoint's job? I'm interested in what alternatives there are.
"Instead of creating Access databases on a file share, people use SP "lists" to store data"

This seems like a better situation than with Access though; at least the Sharepoint list apps are all located within one system; not as discrete files that may be scattered across laptops, desktops, email accounts and server shares, with who knows how many versions.
Does anyone know if that big performance effect is also noticeable while running a couple of VMs?

I have those dreaded pauses when my VMs(typically 2 at a time) are busy doing something and I decide to untar a file for example. Does anyone have a similar problem?

I still run on a 32bit environment so use only 3GB of ram.
Medical Monitoring Networks Get Personal
I've never seen the point of stretching cold muscles. I don't even warm up before a Marathon. The first mile will be easy anyway as the pack thins out, why waste energy warming up?

As for cool down, the key is this: after a long run, your muscles will be weak. If you cross the finish line and just flop down, that's when you're likely to get hurt, there is not enough tension to protect your joints. A warm down forces you to retain your posture while you recover a bit. That is the mechanism for injury prevention, not flushing lactic acid or whatever.
You can make as private as you want, but if a message is only for a part of the team, or only like two people, a forum doesn't help.