skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
you don't have to buy one

Actually I do have to buy one. I use Apple computers exclusively. Except for my home server running Ubuntu which I built myself.

I don't just have to buy one, I'm eager to buy one. The 27-inch iMac is exactly what I've been waiting for. Unfortunately I have to wait for the second revision because the current CPU/graphics hardware is weak. It will be a hard wait.
I hope you didn't get the impression that I thought your opinion was somehow less valuable than someone else's because of the amount of time you've been registered here. I think that's a weak argument and I hate it when people make it.

I look at people's time on the site when they say the community has changed because I want to know if they're contributing or consuming.

This is a community, and it can be reasoned with by anybody, as long as they take the time to try and do it.

I think for the most part, the responses on the threads you linked showed that. Sometimes people will reflexively downvote people because of a perceived slight. I have a feeling that some of the early voting trains get undone as the day goes on.

That being said, I'm sure I've personally contributed a significant amount of noise to conversations here, but if I wanted pure signal I'd probably spend a lot more time on places like LtU. The value of this place is the conversations, far more than the links (in my opinion).
Now that I live there, Colombian food.
It's the easiest way for us to direct them to their own VM and database.

It also seems to work pretty well for all the 37signals apps and and few others that segment this way.
Cisco to Acquire Starent Networks
Can 100% understand this feeling and this is how I fight with this - just release this damn thing!

Not even restricting alfa beta invite only users, just do whatever you can, get feedback and keep improving it! Design never can be perfect - even getting best designers workin on my site i still keep finding issues with it. Its just endless process, and most of your client(not timewasters but client) really dont give it that much attention as you do!

Remember you will loose few clients today but you will learn on you mistakes today also. JUST DO IT!
It might be obvious, BUT i know my knowledge doesnt include working with 28 terabtyes of data. Just reading it in the article is daunting!

I wonder what sort of sandbox they have to play on. They also probably lack the ability to Google or stackoverflow the problem.
Lack of functionality was holding me back. Then it was no mechanism for feedback. I'm still thin on functionality and copy, but I have a feedback mechanism now.

www.SportsLeeg.com

Getting over the "first release" hurdle is tough. So many "what if"'s remain. Once it's out though, motivation goes through the roof to keep things running tight and releasing often. I find myself releasing 3-4 times a week now. Even for small stuff.
That is a very interesting use case. I was thinking about allowing users to create scriptable tests and then provide reporting around that, I think it could meet your requirements. I will add the basic authentication stuff.
Certified Scrum Master Exam | Agile Software Development Made Easy
Kindle's value is not the hardware; the hardware is average. The value is being able to make any book you want show up on the screen in 60 seconds.

I suppose you can use Bittorrent to get the books, but that is inconvenient and not nice to the authors. I agree that Amazon's DRM is annoying, but it is very easy to remove if you are morally opposed. (Sometimes I am in the mood to read on the computer, so I break the DRM for that.)

The hardware itself is also hackable. Jesse Vincent has written some software for the Kindle that lets you view any ebook on it; not just Amazon's.
Ok, if you have a special case for your app and it uses virtual machines and things like that, I would understand.

But, talking about them, why 37signals are doing it? They have "normal" web applications that don't require that kind of separation to be efficient.
Why We Scrapped 3.5 Months of Development
In my opinion, information can never be retrieved from a single source. It always pieced together from different sources by the person with a task at hand. Google is a tool which can let you jump to different pages quickly and let you develop insights into the data they offer and put together your own judgment. Most search engines used to rely on token matching semantics to retrieve results. This has widely changed in the last few years. The golden hammer today is user-data. Google receives millions of clicks a second. With this, it tones its indexes and cached results to provide "better results". So if many people think Wikipedia is their best answer for "mashed potatoes", you probably also do.

I guess a single keyword search is not going to get anything sensible out. The answer lies in being able to interact with such systems and get what you want. Solving the search/retrieval with a single query is a very hard problem as it depends on the context of the user. Try searching for the word "Execute". Does it show pictures of a person being hung or a how-to for the first hello world program in a terminal?
There's an aesthetic component, but mainly it gives flexibility & speed. Think lossy encoding, or maybe dynamic typing.

It's important to note that advantages are not necessary. It wasn't designed. It could just be that it's so widespread that it's impossible to change.
The answer to the same question here: http://c-faq.com/aryptr/aryptrequiv.html

``pointer arithmetic and array indexing [that] are equivalent in C, pointers and arrays are different.''
Obama. He talked change and kept all the same financial advisers of the prior administrations.
The internet is a natural monopoly, a very critical one, and just like water / sewer, gas, electric, etc. it must have some regulation to prevent negative externalities to society.

I think the plug-in mandates, that force infrastructure owners to sell at bulk-rate to new companies, are a great (and proven) way to increase competition and let the market decide what form of internet they want. That's fine. Comcast, et al. would be forced to share.

What I don't like is mandating behavior - such as what type of business you can be in, carry-out, etc. This is what net-neutrality does.

If we find the market equilibrium to be at shitty service for consumers, then we can cross the regulatory bridge when we get there, but for now let's solve the monopoly problem, and see where the cards fall.
Why do you specifically avoid it?
Ask HN: Scraping Answer Sites for ML Project?
Hey,

Does anyone have any advice on how to download yahoo answers without angering anyone? Is this dataset published anywhere?

I'm putzing around with some statistical methods to automatically predict which answers will be highly ranked on question/answer sites like yahoo answers, stackoverflow.com, et. al.

So far I have trained my methods using the published data dumps of stackoverflow.com - the results are interesting/encouraging and I'd like to work with a softer dataset like yahoo answers where the questions are less technical.

(Incidentally this method gives interesting results for predicting points of comment threads on HN, however I refuse to release this without making a nice interface for people to browse)
Real world results affecting in-game behavior with NBA 2K10
OT: The Best Decline Letter of All-Time: Edmund Wilson
Great summary of what went on. I'll definitely apply for #SUS 2010. Jason Fried delivers once again:

- The bootstrapped company starts off thinking: we need to make money.

- The funded company starts of thinking: we need to spend money. these investors have given us x million dollars—we should spend it!

I speak to so many aspiring web entrepreneurs who are spending way too much time searching for money when they should be using their skills to improve their products. If you want to start manufacturing widgets in a huge factory, that is a huge cap-ex. However, if you're building a web-service you can get a rough prototype out of the door - I'd say get it done.

IDEO's motto: "Prototype early & often"
FYI: In "Making of" you're linking to http://reocities.com/tablizer which is a 404.... probably want to fix that ;-D
At a guess, I'd say because it's a popular feature (appeals to vanity AND is easier to remember) that simultaneously makes it easier to load balance.
I don't think so.

It's all about showing capabilities. For full-timers, there might be more interest in "culture fit", but you can't really tell that from a resume.
I find it hilarious that just a short way up the page someone is telling me you don't have to buy one because I so obviously loathe Apple products, while you're telling me my love for them is so strong that you'd buy this machine no matter what.

All I do is speak the truth.
I am very happy to see more companies sharing stories about pivoting in response to customer behavior and feedback. Especially when they are moving closer to real pain.
The article is Not Even Wrong.

Sure, quantum mechanics gives a special role to the observer, but that doesn't mean that the universe and the observers within it just popped into existence because it was being observed. That both begs the question, and takes a popularization of quantum mechanics and turns it into New Age philosophy.
http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html

Only 5 topics, unfortunately.
37Signals could probably do it some other way but this was the most convenient way for them it seems.

They probably do it for the same reason we do: easy to direct traffic to different DBs and VMs this way, instead of waiting for the request to come in and direct it some other way.

There might also be an added value to the business/account seeing their name in the url... Not sure about that one though.
"In all probability, the feeling of religiosity is mind-bound phenomena, not capable of detecting any real external phenomena."

That's an interesting use of the word probability.

Can you justify that position using arguments qualitatively different than those used to justify the opposite position? (That the full-blown mystic experience is qualitatively different than anything that science has ever explained before or any experience generated from within the body, and thus there is no reason to believe that it's necessarily scientifically explainable or endogenous.)

As I said I'm actually more or less with you, I just see the logic of what the other side is saying.
Anonymous Browsing On Android Phones Using Tor
Richard Feynman. I majored in physics because I was inspired by his intellectual curiosity. "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" is a great collection of his memoirs: http://tenniselbow.org/scott/feyn_surely.pdf
Ok, I bumped that one in the restoration queue.

Should have thought of that before, there was another mention of it below but I didn't think I'd be able to work around without messing things up.

thanks!
It is a valid concern, but it would need to be bad to keep from launching (and thus improving based on analytics).

It also depends on your audience. Are they more web savvy?
Any AI in use won't look like AI. When it becomes useful it gets decomposed into controllable components and then used. But it is used in many places.
yes it's a concern but not enough to stop launch (assuming a base level of usability in the current design). you can redesign after launch and track how it improved conversion rates.
Can you wake it up with an IR remote? If not, then auto-sleep is a non-starter for a set-top box. Just for example.
The article endorses this criticism:

"The syllogism goes as follows:

1. Socialism has been a failure everywhere it has been tried;
2. Everyone knows this; and
3. Therefore, we need more socialism.

"

The article doesn't provide support for 1. or 2. The rest is ideological self congratulation.
It is a valid concern. Credibility is important for a startup. It also depends on what you're offering.

If it's something remarkable then it won't matter as much. People will just want it and might look past things like design to get it.

Usually though when people are opening up their wallets they want to make sure the service is credible and the overall design is the first thing that helps them make this distinction, followed by a blog, founding team descriptions, press mentions etc...
I hate searching google for technical jargon (and its worse the more technical the jargon is). Usually google just gives you a bunch of academic papers (in case you are wondering academic papers do not actually explain anything, they just use a bunch of jargon in a plausible way). Gee thanks. If you want I will think up an example.
I have used Linux since 1994. I have written software for Linux. I had a job that was to support Linux. I still run Linux on servers where there's no other option.

I don't like it; I don't think it works well. It doesn't do what I want -- the desktop software options are incredibly lacking, getting anything working is like pulling teeth, and relying on a distributor like Debian or Ubuntu for all my software means that I get stuck either using outdated software or running against an unstable release of the OS -- either way, I spend way more time thinking about the OS than doing my job.

In terms of stability, the lack of stable releases, poor code quality of the kernel, and reliance on distributors to patch and maintain their own kernels really shows through in the number of kernel panics and other issues I see. I can't recall the last time one of my FreeBSD servers or Mac OS X desktops crashed.

Problems I have with Linux are nonexistent with OS X, so that's what I use.
Ask HN: Audio from Startup School?
Anyone capture the presenters with decent audio?
Ask PG: One submission per day?
Re: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903841 (and similar discussions about signal-to-noise)

What if HN limited submissions to one per day?

Wouldn't this encourage more quality submissions and discourage the "hurl everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach?

One question would be a case where someone has a few good stories to submit. In that case (if they're really that good) I imagine one of two things happening:

- others submit them and have the opportunity to participate on the site (wouldn't broader participation be a good thing?)
- nobody submits them and they can be added the next day

The basic idea is that you have one shot per day, so make it a good one: helpful, interesting, meaningful, etc.
Actually if you rewrite the equation you can see that:

more capacity != more machines
more capacity = more machines + load distribution strategy
Awesome work. Seriously, mad props are in order for a bang hack job.

Great project, mate!
Scripting. I am not quite sure what you mean by that, but please make it simple. Pingdoms custom checks are simple because site owners just need to make an endpoint that prints out an xml snippet.

Fx. I have a service here: http://api.convert.io/realtime.svc/pingdom/queue-length which prints out:
<pingdom_http_custom_check><status>OK</status><response_time>2</response_time></pingdom_http_custom_check>

How about you offer the same, but add a few more check types. One with the status/response time and another with just a single number.

<nimbu_http_custom_check><check_value>2</check_value></nimbu_http_custom_check>
Thank you for the advice and input. I'll repost in 1 hour with a changed name. Does "Survey: Phone Loss & Misplacement" sound good?
That's a very interesting observation about parenting. I can completely relate because my grandmother, who was raised by a wealthy, but very stern mother, is totally submissive, and has a "midset of resignation". On the other hand, I've always been able to negotiate with my parents and there was never much enforcement of the rules (I could guilt-trip my mother for anything I wanted--especially with some cold hard logic). I don't think a single person would describe me as having a mindset of resignation.
I will add that option. Thank you for the input! Any other criticism/thoughts on the survey?
Time Warner Routers Still Hackable Despite Company Assurance, Blogger Says
Sorry for not replying earlier. I just wanted to say that I hope things turn out that way, because that would be the ideal situation: fewer human casualties on both sides.

Maybe I've seen one too many war movies, but I worry that the command-and-control mentality of the armed forces could override the soldier's moral sense, at least immediately, by forcing them to detach themselves from the situations.

Remember that while a soldier may think "big whoop" about a hundred-million dollar aircraft going down, their commanding officer (who's butt is on the line for that loss) may not think so, and so will do everything in their power to prevent such losses. That may include some "collateral damage".

At least, if the soldiers later suffer from PTSD, hopefully in the end they will speak their minds and the truth will come out. That's how we've heard about a lot of the atrocities of past wars.
That is interesting - have you done this? How did it go?
Arrays and pointers are not the same type. Pointers are used to access array elements, however the variable itself is not a pointer type. It's an array of some other type (which can also be an array). In addition to automatic memory allocation that happens with an array, this matters whenever compile-time type-checking happens.

So I guess it depends on what you mean by "equivalent."
Why can't traffic to/from your home be encrypted?
Some of you maybe interested in this course http://www.reddit.com/r/carlhprogramming
I never actually met him, and he died before I could, but J Dilla is the entire reason I got into music.
To clarify my point, this will be just one of the approaches in the future. I see also a lot of small "clouds" on personal devices that have trusted pairs they automatically sync with.

You walk in your office, and your phone/pda pulls down your days tasks from your desktop/laptop wirelessly and update everything. Maybe that data lives in a cloud, but it could be local to the company, it could be just that desktop, or it could be in a giant data warehouse.
isn't worrying about your graphics design just a proximate cause of fear? we constantly pick at and spin around one little thing when we're afraid of moving forward and getting to the real root of the problem.
Would love to know what his KWH consumption is per month. His electricity bill is 1/2 mine. Is electricity generally cheap in North America?
I agree, his writings are eye-opening. I know a bit too much about neuroscience, I think, so sometimes when he ventures that way in The Blank Slate I'm unconvinced, but the core of his arguments always stand.

My first encounter with his works was The Language Instinct, which was required reading for a course I took on psycholinguistics. If that were more recent, I would have mentioned it in my initial post, because that book completely changed my understanding of human language.
I don't take issue with your conclusion, but I don't think the Internet is a natural monopoly. It's not the Internet itself that is sold, after all, but access to the Internet, and it's entirely possible for two access providers to compete with each other to sell access to the Internet. There is only one Internet, but there isn't only one access provider to the Internet.

At the moment I'm online via cell phone tethering, and I have a choice of several different providers of that tethering from the very location that I am writing this. My provider hardly qualifies as a monopoly if I can choose from several competing providers if my provider decides to block certain content. I suspect that over time wireless will become even bigger.

Television cable companies are currently the fastest and most ubiquitous providers of broadband access to the Internet, and these are indeed somewhat monopolistic. I have my choice among cable broadband providers but I understand that not everyone has my choices. For those people, their broadband provider is an effectively a monopoly. However, this is just one moment in time. How will things be five and ten years down the road? At the moment, cable broadband access to the Internet is a monopoly for many customers, but I don't think this should be taken as a fundamental statement about the Internet itself. Over the years access to the Internet has evolved and it will keep on evolving. I put the probability that we will be at the mercy of our tv cable broadband providers ten years from now at close to 0%.

UNLESS the government intervenes! If the government intervenes, then all bets are off. The government can use its power to create and maintain a monopoly. In fact, this is what the government did with telephone access and also US mail. Ma Bell (which you may or may not remember) and the US Post Office were not natural monopolies, but government monopolies. They are both similar to the Internet in that they connected people in far-away places, so the analogy is not that bad. My point is that it was government that made them (for a time) monopolies by making competition illegal.

Anyway, sorry for the length. I just wanted to address that particular point.
Microsoft "Opens" Outlook Personal Folders Format (.pst)
I wish I could forget my Geocities pages. The internet has a tendency to record all the stupid things you do when you're young.
I hope to finally make this one. :)
My Biggest issue is that when you take the leap from "side project" to start-up, there has to be reasonable confidence that the idea is unique enough to make it as a startup.

Somehow I wont be building a search engine this week :)
I've recently decided that I want sell my company in two years' time if I can get to the point where it is worth £x,xxx,xxx. Whether I will or not is another matter. However, what I've found is that since making this commitment in my mind, I've started working a lot harder. I have a figure and a deadline looming over me. In order to hit that figure I'm going to need 10 times the amount of traffic and a 50% increase in conversions. Now that I have a figure to shoot I'm hacking together systems to pull all my data together so I can quickly see when I'm straying from the path.

Napoleon Hill's Think & Grow Rich has a slightly suspect title - but the content on this area is fantastic.
Are you suggesting a business model ;) ?
Sysadmin’s phone: ring, ring.

Sysadmin: “Mr. sysadmin here. How can I help you?”

You: “Hi. An app that I have been using has started misbehaving. When I run it, I get an error saying something about the permissions on /usr/share/zoneinfo-something. Can you help me?”

Sysadmin: “Sure. What app is it?”

You: “It’s in my home directory, /home/carl/app/bin/myapp."

Sysadmin: “Just a sec.” noise from keyboard in the background

Sysadmin: “I didn't see any error.”

You: “Nevermind, I figured it out. Thanks!.”

Narrator: Did you notice what went wrong in this scene? The administrator was supposed to check the permissions on all the files in /usr/share, thus earning the slim chance to perform the reproductive act. The next day, the administrator's planet was destroyed by aliens. Can you guess the name of the planet? IT WAS EARTH! DON'T DATE ROBOTS."
Going Back to PHP
I got 9 up votes for my comment on PHP in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903402 so I wrote this blog entry while at work. I have a feeling the post makes me sound like a douche. We'll see.
I read somewhere that total crime rates in Switzerland are comparable to other European countries' rates, but that Switzerland has higher gun crime rates compared to other European countries' rates.
Inverse here
I don't understand why computers need to figure out laws of the universe. There are so many dying concerns already on this planet - which can be solved by a man machine symbiosis. Personally I think such ideas are cool, but are not of great/immediate use. It reminds me of the machine built to find the answer to the question "What is this life about?" in "hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy". 42!
Just out of interest, do you find lispdoc.com useful generally for this kind of thing?
Microsoft, Google and the Bear